Open IPTV Forum Formed

ATT, Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Phillips, Samsung, Siemens Networks, Sony and Telecom Italia have formed the Open IPTV Forum that will work to define an interoperable end to end specification for the delivery of IPTV services. It will work to aggregate the diverse standards from other bodies into a complete delivery system. It will also work to accelerate the full standardization of IPTV technologies. It plans to establish requirements and architecture specifications by September 2007 and protocol specifications by December 2007.

Initially the Forum will consist of the founding member companies, but will be open for other companies at a later time.

The Forum's website is at:

http://www.openiptvforum.org/index.html

This is an interesting organization. Note that Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft are missing but ATT, one of their biggest customers, is a founding member. There is a clear need for further IPTV standards, particularly at the systems level. ATIS in the U.S. and the ITU at an international level are attacking this problem.

I have requested a briefing with them to get a better understanding of what they are doing and why. I will report what I find.