Open IPTV Forum works toward unified standards

Rather than adding to the rising cacophony of existing IPTV standards and proposals, Forum aims to fill the gaps left between existing ones By Steve Hawley

When particle physicists envisioned the Grand Unification Theory, they could not have anticipated the fledgling Open IPTV Forum, which announced its existence at the end of March. Yet the Forum's primary objective, to "specify a common and open end-to-end solution for supplying a variety of IPTV and Internet multimedia services to retail-based consumer equipment in the home network," may in fact result in a sort of IPTV unification of its own.

Industry-wide participation
The Open IPTV Forum was launched with nine member companies that represent three different IPTV constituencies: Service providers, represented by AT&T, Telecom Italia and the France Telecom Group; Network suppliers, represented by Ericsson and Siemens, and consumer electronics suppliers, represented by Sony, Philips, Panasonic and Samsung.

It takes a moment to absorb the significance of the consumer electronics contingent. "We must look not only at the challenges of interoperability to enable telecoms to offer a wide range of services," said Barry Gravenhorst, the Vice Chair of the Open IPTV Initiative's Steering Group, "we must also look at the challenges surrounding the home network.

Consumers must have confidence that they can take home a new device, hook it up, and have it work." Although Mr Gravenhorst's day job is to head up business development and operator relations for Sony, he was quick to say that these challenges apply equally to any vendor.

Rationale behind the Open IPTV Forum
The Forum's founders started with a set of basic assumptions about the evolution of the IPTV market, which until now has been fragmented and characterized by proprietary solutions. Now that it is moving from trials to commercial deployment, the current focus is on scalability. A transition period is underway, in which analogue TV is phasing out and governments are easing barriers to TV over IP. By 2010, they believe, IPTV will be mass market, and personalized TV will be a given. Recognizing this, the Open IPTV Forum hopes to be a catalyst by enabling a standardized set of services, applications and use-cases for video-on-demand, PVR services and interactive television (including polling).

Other areas include personalized advertising that recognizes subscriber profiles and content usage, and the ability to share content within or between fixed-line and mobile domains or to access it remotely from different locations.

Broad perspective
The Open IPTV Forum has decided to take a perspective broader than other standardization initiatives, by looking not only at IPTV but also to the IMS control layer, the service layer, network transport and consumer electronics as well. Only then, according to the founders, can the Forum accomplish a set of truly end-to-end quantitative guidelines; especially given all the access, control and consumer device alternatives.

IPTV must not only accommodate managed services such as multi-channel television and movies-on-demand, but also to allow consumers the choice to access niche content from the open Internet. "From a consumer electronics point of view," said Mr Gravenhorst, "we hope to enable a horizontal market for devices that access content from both; one that is not fragmented."

For that reason, the Open IPTV Forum is an advocate for the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) initiative, which already enjoys broad support from vendors and operators alike, and hopes to collaborate in the efforts of the 3GPP, ATIS, CableLabs, the DSL Forum, the DVB initiative, ETSI, HGI, IPSphere, the ITU-T, OMA and the TMN Forum and others as opportunities emerge. Its work is likely to influence, and be influenced by, consumer devices, IPTV middleware, Web browsers, and portals and by initiatives that have already defined IPTV use-cases, such as the Marlin Initiative.

Unlike other standardization initiatives, the Open IPTV Forum has a global perspective, to take into account the differing status of TV and content delivery technologies in different countries and different parts of the world. For example, while most of the world has not yet switched off analogue TV, Sweden has; a fact not lost on the Forum's chair, Mr YunChao Hu, who works for Swedish telecoms vendor Ericsson and is involved in the company's IMS product line.

(Ericsson's IMS and IPTV efforts are further detailed in the July 2006 issue of IPTV News Analyst).

Forum deliverables
The Open IPTV Forum intends to define and deliver its first Architecture and Requirements document by the fourth quarter of 2007, followed by a User-Network Interface Protocol specification in 2008; for IPTV and Internet multimedia services. Leveraging existing technologies and standards as much as possible, it will define the functionalities and interactions needed in order to provide interactive and personalized services, including the blending of IPTV and communications services. Along the way, it will identify gaps that might exist in specifications and standards and provide feedback to the standards bodies that originated them.

The Forum will consider not only the content delivery and security aspects of IPTV that are such a large part of today's IPTV discussions, but also embrace service discovery, billing, operations, maintenance and management. It will also identify service provider, content provider and other interfaces within both managed IPTV networks and the open Internet where operators can apply service level agreements to ensure quality.

Status of the initiative
When the Open IPTV Forum announced its existence, industry press and pundits raised a flurry of conjecture about the organization. Several particularly pointed references were made to the fact that Microsoft and Alcatel were "snubbed" by AT&T. When asked about this, Mr Hu answered that "many companies were invited to participate, but the Forum's leadership decided that it had to start somewhere and so we launched when we did."

The Open IPTV Forum's efforts will not end with the release of technical standards. In fact, the organization is considering a certification and logo program, not unlike those of Microsoft (for Windows and Plays for Sure) and Intel (Inside); which were initially scoffed at but succeeded in establishing those two companies as consumer brands.

In summary, the Open IPTV Forum has its work cut out for itself to create its envisioned "any-over-any-toany" convergence (or dare we say Grand Unification) of IPTV.