Open IPTV Forum Interview

Last Friday I held an interview with the Open IPTV Forum. I spoke with Yunchao Hu of Ericsson who is acting as chairman of the Steeering Group and Barry Gravenhorst of Sony who is the vice chairman of the Steering Group of the Open IPTV Forum. They described four key objectives for the organization:

• It will specify a common and open end to end solution for supplying a variety of TV and Internet multimedia services to consumer devices in the home network.
• It will consider establishing a certification and logo program.
• It will include all the key players - customer equipment, content providers, network operators, service providers, network vendors, home device vendors
• It will strive to bring standards to the market more quickly than traditional standards organizations.

The organization plans to work in the following areas:

• A common IPTV Terminal Function (ITF) that supports services from both an open Internet and a managed network environment.
• Interactive and personalized services and the integration with communications services.
• Convergence of IPTV and multimedia services across different access technologies.
• Easy integration of 3rd party content offerings.

The Open IPTV Forum will base its work on existing technologies and standards wherever possible. It will define the necessary extensions to fill gaps and provide these extensions back to the relevant standards bodies. Candidate technologies include:

• DLNA
• IMS
• DVB-IPI
• Internet portals
• Web browsers
• Multimedia middleware

As reported earlier the founding members included ATT, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Siemens, Ericsson, Sony, Phillips, Panasonic, and Samsung.

They identified three reasons why the Forum was formed:

• No other standards body is covering all aspects of an end to end IPTV solution in a timely manner.
• To address the combination of managed networks and the open Internet for service delivery.
• To address the blending of IPTV and communications services.

Open IPTV Forum membership is open to companies that will actively contribute to the Forum's objectives. It expects to complete the detailed arrangements to support new applicants after the summer.

You can get more information at the Open IPTV Forum at www.openiptvforum.org

The Open IPTV Forum is attacking important problems. Today every IPTV middleware package and sometimes separate deployments of the same middleware package have different interfaces. This makes it difficult for the set-t0p box manufacturers and their silicon suppliers. These companies have to go out and develop new software for every middleware package they want to support at a minimum. This is impossible for consumer device companies. There is no way that Sony or any other manufacturer will put an IPTV set-top box into their TVs if different software has to be loaded into it for every IPTV network.

The other work items for the Forum are also good choices. Personalised and interactive services are very important differentiators for IPTV services. The Forum must address the functions required for interactive and other new forms of advertising as well.

The convergence of IPTV and IMS is another important issue. I wrote a report on this for MRG http://www.mrgco.com last year. Bringing telephone services to the TV is another important differentiator, one that the U.S. cable companies are working diligently on.

Integrating the open Internet with managed IPTV services is also important. We will release a new report on this subject the week after next. The Forum is planning to do it right by addressing how content will be brought from the Internet as well as how third party content providers can provide service in addition to the managed IPTV service.

ATIS in the U.S. and the ITU have similar objectives to the Open IPTV Forum. All of this work will need to be harmonized and brought to market. It may be too late. Most of the large telcos have already committed to IPTV architectures. They will have to somehow evolve to Open IPTV Forum standards over time if this work is to be meaningful. It is just not clear how this will occur.