New ATIS Standard Targets IPTV Deployments

Targeting simplification in telco TV deployments, ATIS on Wednesday released its IPTV High Level Architecture Standard which was developed by the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) and provides a architectural framework to enable end-to-end systems’ implementation and interoperability for the supporting network design.

The document, according to ATIS, serves as a reference architecture for IPTV functional specifications being developed by the IIF.

ATIS notes that more than 50 of its member companies are actively engaged in its IPTV standardization efforts, including Verizon, Qwest, AT&T, BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, Cisco, Motorola, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. The ATIS IIF was formed at the recommendation of an IPTV Exploratory Group to the ATIS Board of Directors.

“The High Level Architecture marks a major step in introducing IPTV into homes globally,” said Daniel O’Callaghan, IIF Chairman and Principal Member of Technical Staff at Verizon, in prepared comments. “It was a cooperative effort among many of the communications industry’s leading service providers and vendors who worked closely together with the common goal of helping IPTV reach its market potential.”

ATI said the standard takes into consideration the architecture scaling from local to regional and national service offerings and identifies the components that will interface with each other to deliver IPTV. These include all interfaces between the service-providers and network providers. The standard also includes considerations on Web-based approaches as well as IMS-based approaches.

“These standards activities are useful in that they raise the full spectrum of issues involved in a service opportunity like IPTV, but I’d have to say that what makes a market is a melding of architecture and opportunity that creates ROI,” said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. “Standards can help to do that, but as the current worldwide IPTV activity shows they have a way of lagging behind market developments. The biggest step this particular standard represents is the step toward the more detailed specifications that will actually help guide procurement and deployment.”

ATIS said work is already underway in five other key areas, including linear/broadcast TV service, consumer-domain initialization and attachment; media protocols; remote management of devices in the consumer domain; and an emergency alert system for IPTV. The ATIS IIF documents are available in the ATIS Document Center at https://www.atis.org/docstore/default.aspx.  

“The architecture’s intricacy shows the many aspects of entertainment, communications technology, and security that were taken into consideration in this complex and highly cooperative undertaking,” said Randy Sharpe, Co-Chair of the IIF Architecture Task Force and Senior Principal Engineer at Alcatel-Lucent, in prepared comments. “It truly covers all aspects of IPTV delivery.”

ATIS www.atis.org

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines