GENEVA – While IPTV deployments are well under way around the world, standards surrounding the service’s technology have never been set. Until now.
Today the International Telecommunication Union released the first set of global standards for Internet Protocol Television. They were built with technical contributions from service providers and manufacturers from the information and communication technology (ICT) sector.
“IPTV is one of the most highly visible services to emerge as part of the development of next-generation networks (NGN). Indeed, it is seen as both the business case and principal driver for accelerating deployment of NGN,” says the ITU press release.
"Standards are crucial for IPTV to reach its market potential and global audience,” said Malcolm Johnson, director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. “They 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. Standards here will encourage innovation, help mask the complexity of services, guarantee quality of service, ensure interoperability and, ultimately, help players remain competitive."
"The stage of work that sees completion this week lays the groundwork for an area of ICT that some predict could attract up to 100 million subscribers in the next three years. It’s easy to see why so many of the world’s key ICT companies have been keen to progress this work in ITU. Malta is proud to host this event and play a part in advancing this important technology,” said Censu Galea, Malta’s minister for competitiveness and communications, in the same release.
Contained within the standards are the high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services. ITU’s next phase of IPTV work – IPTV-GSI (global standards initiative) – will centre on the speedy preparation of standards based on documents produced by FG IPTV as well as on the detailed protocols required, adds the release.
The 2006−2007 period has seen numerous physical and electronic meetings and workshops progressing work on IPTV around the world. Twenty-one documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service (QoS), security, digital rights management (DRM), unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks will be submitted to the ITU-T Study Group charged with progressing and distributing the work. The IPTV-GSI will build on the momentum generated over the past 20 months, and it is foreseen that contributions and participation will continue to increase, adds the release.
The first meeting of IPTV-GSI will convene in Seoul, Republic of Korea from 15 to 22 January 2008.
