Melvin G. Calimag
A UN-attached agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), has announced the first set of global standards for IPTV that were built with technical contributions from service providers and manufacturers from the information and communication technology.
IPTV is one of the most highly visible services to emerge as part of the development of next-generation networks (NGN) and is seen as both the business case and principal driver for accelerating deployment of NGN.
The new standards were developed by the Focus Group on IPTV in ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector.
Contained within the documents produced by the Focus Group 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 center on the speedy preparation of standards based on documents produced by FG IPTV as well as on the detailed protocols required.
ITU said 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, the ITU said, will build on the momentum generated over the past 20 months, and it is foreseen that contributions and participation will continue to increase.
Operators consider IPTV a key element of a triple-play package of voice, video, and data services. Standardization is imperative if service providers are to offer high quality products with value-additions, such as video-on-demand services that will inevitably drive the market.
A combination of voice, Internet, and video services over a single broadband link and from a single provider is foreseen as the ultimate goal of the broadband revolution.
"Standards are crucial for IPTV to reach its market potential and global audience. 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," aid Malcolm Johnson, director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau.
"Standards here will encourage innovation, help mask the complexity of services, guarantee quality of service, ensure interoperability and, ultimately, help players remain competitive."
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