ITU Announces First Global IPTV Standards

Hoping to eventually make IP video service deployments less complex, time-consuming and resource-intensive, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) today announced the first set of global standards for IPTV.

The group said the standards were built with technical contributions from leading service providers and manufacturers from the information and communication technology sector. The ITU sees IPTV as the principal driver for next-generation networks.

Telcos have complained loudly that interoperability between devices in the long infrastructure ecosystems needed to deploy IPTV is sadly lacking. The new standards were developed by the Focus Group on IPTV in ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector.

“[Standards] are necessary in order to give service providers — whether traditional broadcasters, ISPs, cable operators or telecoms service providers — control over their platforms and their offerings,” said Malcolm Johnson, director of the ITU’s Telecommunications Standardization Bureau, in prepared comments.

The documents contain the high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services. ITU said its next phase of IPTV work — IPTV-GSI (global standards initiative) — will center on “the speedy preparation of standards based on documents produced by FG IPTV as well as on the detailed protocols required.”

The ITU said 21 documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service (QoS), security, digital rights management, unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks will be submitted to the ITU-T Study Group charged with advancing and distributing the work.

“We expect to have the requirements and architecture documents out as a recommended standard by mid-2008,” said Ghassem Koleyni, chairman of the ITU-T Focus Group in IPTV.

The FG IPTV worked on the project with other ITU study groups as well as the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum, the DSL Forum and the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI), among others.

“Much of the QoS work was taken from the DSL Forum and lots of other parts were developed by the ATIS IIF and the HGI,” added Kolyeni.

ATIS www.atis.org
DSL Forum www.dslforum.org
Home Gateway Initiative www.homegatewayinitiative.org
International Telecommunications Union www.itu.int

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