ATIS Shares Details of Its IPTV Standardization Effort with Global Standards Community

ATIS Hosts meeting of ITU-T IPTV Focus Group in Mountain View, CA

January 25, 2007, Mountain View, CA – The IPTV Focus Group of the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) kicked off this week its five-day meeting with an opening plenary session, in which ATIS shared details of its IPTV standardization activities over the last 12 months. The week-long session, hosted by ATIS, signifies the growing importance that service providers and network operators around the world are placing on the deployment of IPTV.

In opening comments, ATIS President & CEO Susan Miller shared with the 200 meeting attendees that IPTV is serving as a “change agent” for the industry, and “as both the business case and principal driver for accelerating deployment of the next generation network.”  Miller noted that for North American service providers in particular, “IPTV is a critical ingredient to bundled service offerings that encompass television services, mobile services, Internet access, and much more.”

“We have seen in the last decade, enormous investments in broadband, and fiber deployments to the home and to the premise,” said Miller. With the building of the network infrastructure necessary to support IPTV service, “the door is open to a seemingly endless array of services and a fully converged network experience for the user.”

As part of the opening plenary, Dan O’Callaghan of Verizon and chair of the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) provided an overview of the work conducted by the ATIS forum, to include completion in 2006 of the industry’s first set of requirements for IPTV Architecture; Digital Rights Management (DRM); and QoS Metrics and Management.  O’Callaghan also shared details of the ATIS IIF’s IPTV Architecture Roadmap, which defines the phases in which IPTV architecture standards and specifications will be developed by ATIS. “The roadmap allows the ATIS IIF to now define the specifications which support the many exciting services that are the real ‘buzz factor’ around IPTV,” said O’Callaghan.  With the requirements documents and roadmap now complete, the ATIS IIF is already underway with its first phase of specifications for network/service attachment, service discovery, and Emergency Alert Services (EAS), and specifications supporting accessibility, to include Closed Caption services.  Future specifications to be developed by IIF include those addressing Video-On-Demand (VOD), Pay-Per-View (PPV) transaction-based services, as well as Interactive TV, multiplayer games, Network PVR, and in-home peer-to-peer interaction.

A specification for a common scrambling algorithm has also been defined by the ATIS IIF and is presently under final review by the IIF’s DRM Task Force.

ITU-T IPTV Focus Group Chair Ghassem Koleyni of Nortel Networks thanked ATIS during the plenary for its “very good level of cooperation” and for sharing with the Focus Group the ATIS IIF’s various IPTV requirements and other deliverables.  The ITU-T IPTV Focus Group is expected to draft an IPTV Architecture Framework document by 4Q 2007, which would then be introduced to ITU-T Study Group 13 for approval.

The ITU-T IPTV Focus Group meeting was conducted at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mountain View, CA.  The following ATIS member companies sponsored the ATIS-hosted event:  Microsoft, AT&T, Juniper Networks, Telechemy, and Verizon.

About ATIS

ATIS is a leading standards development and technical planning organization that is committed to rapidly developing and promoting technical and operations standards for the communications and related information technologies industry worldwide using a pragmatic, flexible and open approach. Participants from more than 350 communications companies are active in ATIS’ 22 industry committees, Incubator Solutions Program, and other activities. www.atis.org

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