ITU meetings to establish global IPTV standards

January 18, 2008 – The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has met this week to work on the next phase of its efforts to establish global standards for the IPTV industry.

Consensus on standards is hoped to increase simplification and integration for IPTV manufacturers, service providers and customers.  Over 1,200 IPTV-oriented companies have met in Seoul, Korea to form focus groups (FGs) for the discussion of global telecommunications recommendations for 30 agendas regarding next-generation networks (NGNs).

“This initial high-level output of the ITU IPTV-FG is just one step in the process of defining standards for next-generation delivery networks and services, and considerably more work is expected going forward,” said Microsoft in a statement.  “Today, major operators around the world are deploying IPTV services based on existing Internet standards.  IPTV is a relatively new service offering, and the full set of requirements for standards is not known.  We can expect to see continued activity in this area for some time to come.”

An ITU spokesman added that the approval process for new standards is expected to take under eight months to complete.  Attendees have reported that the process has been relatively consensus based so far, due in part to the relatively new nature of IPTV technology.

“This standards activity is in an early stage IPTV market unlike some other technologies that started to do standards when their technology is pretty mature,” said Naxin Wang, System Architect and Senior Manager of System Software Engineering for UTStarcom.  “For this standard body, the competition is not that intense.  People work together to say what is the best way to create this market for IPTV to take off, instead of saying ‘I’m Cisco, do it our way’.  It is more collaborative than other standards bodies.”

For the middleware focus groups, the main topic at the latest meeting was the nature of the high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services.  The three architectures that emerged from the 2007 focus group were NGN based, non-NGN based, and NGN IMS architectures.

Jurgen Heiles, Manager of Infotainment Delivery Standardisation for Nokia Siemens Networks, commented that: “The ITU activity is basically consensus-focused, so there’s no majority voting.  It is important to basically satisfy all needs and also work it out so several solutions are defined…  In the future, when the NGN networks become more widely deployed, IPTV can make use of a common infrastructure that is provided by NGN and does things like authentication, user database, common results and mission control for quality of service.”

The focus groups are to centre on 21 documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service, security, digital rights management, unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks, all with the ultimate goal of moving from proprietary platforms to interoperable ones.  A further three ITU meetings are to take place later this year.