Industry Body Devising Standard for Vacuuming IPTV User Data
SAN JOSE -- An industry group set an ambitious schedule to produce a protocol for capturing and sharing usage data records on IPTV networks. The data are needed for international standards for everything from rights management and content decisions to network management and accounting, said Kelly Anderson, pres. of the group, IPDR.org (Internet Protocol Data Record).
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IPTV offers a chance at gaining a breadth and depth of customer information far beyond that available so far to pay- TV providers, Anderson said. But the challenges also are greater, she said. “Just a huge amount of supplier partner settlement will occur” to fulfill content agreements and other revenue splits, Anderson said. IPTV will set new requirements to deliver data in real time and to let information flow in both directions, for interactive services, she said.
Special effort is needed to incorporate forward-looking standards into IPTV networks, Anderson said: Ordinarily, service providers have engineers create such networks without making them account for an array of business requirements just down the road, and retrofitting systems costs much more than anticipating needs.
IPTV plans are advanced, but providers like AT&T still typically are using test networks and can readily adopt data standards, Anderson said. “Everybody is defining what this architecture needs to look like without knowing what these systems need to consume” in the way of information, she said. It’s much more efficient to “think of defining your data while you're designing your networks.” The hardest part is mapping service requirements to data-record functionality, she said.
To get started, IPDR ran an open meeting sponsored by member Cisco Systems, held Thurs. and Fri. on its campus here. Other “charter members” are Sprint, Rogers Wireless, Hewlett-Packard, VeriSign, Amdocs and BSG Storage Solutions. Supporting members include SBC Labs, now part of the new AT&T, and Motorola. The attendee list included employees of BellSouth, Comcast, Cox, Intel, Lucent and Microsoft.
IPDR plans to submit protocols to international groups such as the ITU and 3GPP for adoption as industry standards, Anderson told us. Her group is working especially closely with the IPTV Interoperability Forum of the Alliance for Telecom Industry Solutions (ATIS), represented at the meeting. ATIS and IPDR said last week that the American National Standards Group had approved as an American national standard for trial use a generic IPDR specification for billing applications for packet-based services on which ATIS had collaborated.
The standards bodies are organizing only on IPTV, said Anderson. The ITU has invited IPDR to an April 4-5 open call meeting on IPTV in Geneva, she said. The interoperability forum, to which almost all the service providers belong, isn’t defining the IPTV industry architecture until Oct., Anderson said. No other industry groups are doing work competing with or overlapping IPDR’s, she said: “We're just one piece of that [IPTV protocol development], but nobody else is working on that piece.”
Friction at the event here hinged on privacy. Meeting participants from “across the board” questioned “what kind of data needs to be captured,” Anderson said: “Does it defy privacy? How much information is too much information on your customers?” But the group is assuming “we're only creating a protocol,” she said. “We're not writing business rules around it… We're saying it’s up to you how to use it, giving you data from the network.” Probing information on specific customers’ behavior will be important to providers, Anderson said. “To know how often someone pauses a movie is completely applicable” to legitimate business decisions, she said.
“We have a pretty aggressive timeline. It’s important to have that because the service is moving fast,” Anderson told meeting participants. She laid out a schedule: Submissions on accounting architecture by March 17. Submission on use case for the services specification, and liaison letters and first contact with other bodies, by March 31. Submissions for the service specification by April 14. Completion of protocol and service specification requirements by June 2. Draft service specifications for all IPTV services by July 14. Submission of protocol and service specifications work to liaisons by Aug. Reference code work completed by Sept. Release to IPDR.org members by Dec.