Nine Companies Form Open IPTV Forum

A group of nine companies--AT&T, Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens, Sony, and Telecom Italia--have founded an industry consortium, dubbed the Open IPTV Forum, which will be tasked with defining an interoperable, end-to-end specification for delivery of IPTV services. Initially, the forum will consist of only the founding members; however, the latter say that it will be open to other companies at a later date, and that it will seek participation from the communications and entertainment industries. According to the founding members, the forum will "focus on development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies, and help to maximize the benefits of IPTV for consumers, network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and infrastructure providers." Although various standardization bodies are currently addressing specific elements of IPTV, the founders say, the Open IPTV Forum will attempt to aggregate the currently diverse array of IPTV standards into a "complete delivery solution," with the goal of accelerating the full standardization of IPTV-related technologies. They claim that the forum will establish requirements and architecture and protocol specifications later this year.

According to a statement issued by the forum's founding members, IPTV presents "unique possibilities" for integration of content and communication services offered across mobile handsets and home devices. If interoperability is ensured between consumer equipment and services compliant to the forum's specification, the founding members say, consumers will be able to "easily access their choice of contents and services among multiple service providers." In addition to "work[ing] on the basis of suitable open-standards technologies," they continue, the Open IPTV Forum "will also address key technology elements such as content protection, necessary interfaces that allow IPTV services to be delivered over both managed network environments and the public Internet, and adequate measures to ensure interoperability between such services and retail consumer devices." Candidates include (though are not limited to) IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA).

Originally Published: April 16, 2007 in [itvt] Issue 7.26 Part 1

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