ITU-T Sets Up IPTV Focus Group to Coordinate Standards
GENEVA -- ITU-T members established an IPTV focus group Wed., with the aim of coordinating a broad range of standards development work into a global standard, officials said. Standards bodies from the existing TV and video markets are creating standards for IPTV, but are focusing on -- and coming from -- their industry perspectives, officials said. What hasn’t been identified is a coordinated framework that says this is how IPTV works, this is the boundary of IPTV and these are the ways IPTV can be coordinated and managed as a service, they said.
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“The IPTV market is already working very well. It’s a thriving market today,” said Julien Maisonneuve, standardization mgr. at Alcatel: “The work that we should do should be concentrated now on providing interworking between the key domains, on identifying a framework to allow inter working between different solutions. There are several organizations that work on IPTV. What we need is more coordination with them and [to] try to leverage the work that was already performed inside and outside the ITU-T.”
“IPTV is a very complex service. It’s not just a network delivery problem. It’s not just an application problem,” said a network operator executive. “If you want to create a worldwide IPTV standard and you have a different standardization body for every continent, more or less, you may end up with various flavors of the same thing,” said Thomas Wiegand, head of Image Communication Group at the Heinrich-Hertz-Institute and co-chmn. for video coding in ITU-T study group 16 and in ISO/IEC MPEG. “Let’s not underestimate the scope of IPTV,” the network operator executive said. “We have a huge number of components that we need to pull together. So standardization and interoperability is really key.”
“What we should really focus on -- and it’s a suggestion that where ITU could offer its best value -- is looking at the interfaces between the components,” the company executive said. Many of the components have standards, but “what really matters is standardization for interoperability between the components and their interfaces.” “We are quite interested in ensuring that we have common global standards” for IPTV, said Richard Brand of Nortel, vice chmn. of the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF): “Our idea is to progress worldwide standards along with what we in ATIS are doing.”
IPTV relates closely to work on NGN, officials said. Standards work should be included in the work on NGN and the coordination activity should be included in home networking. Regulatory issues will play a big part in IPTV if it goes global, officials said. A hundred forty delegates from member states, corporate members, SDOs, forums and consortia participated in ITU’s consultation here Tues. and Wed. A preliminary mission statement was fleshed out: “The mission of IPTV focus group is to coordinate and promote the development of global IPTV standards taking into account the existing work of the ITU SGs as well as SDOs, fora and consortia.”
Defining a structure for the focus group met resistance from members, officials said. But a preliminary list of goals was agreed: (1) Define IPTV. (2) Review and do gap analysis of existing standards and ongoing work. (3) Coordinate existing standardization activities. (4) Harmonize development of new standards. (5) Encourage interoperability with existing systems where possible.
A list of important subjects was fleshed out from the meeting’s 42 written contributions, officials said. The initial list of categories includes architecture and requirements; QoS and performance aspects; service security and content protection; network and control aspects; end systems and interoperability; and middleware and application platforms. The list is designed to solicit contributions that will direct the focus group’s work.
The group’s structure should be determined after the expectations are more clearly defined, officials said. Experts will discuss the focus group’s mandate and scope in more detail during the first meeting. The focus group will report directly the ITU-T’s dir.
Five points should be in the mandate, said Pierre-Andre Probst senior adviser to OFCOM/Switzerland: (1) Define scope of IPTV. (2) Review existing standards. (3) Identify gaps. (4) Coordinate standards development. (5) Harmonize new standards.
The provisional chmn. of the focus group is Ghassem Koleyni of Nortel Networks. The provisional vice chmn. are Duo Liu of the China Academy of Telecom Research, Chae-Sub Lee of S. Korea’s Electronics & Telecom Research Institute, and Simon Jones, BT’s chief IPTV architect. The focus group leadership is subject to confirmation during the first meeting.
The first meeting of the focus group will likely be in Geneva the 2nd week of July. ITU-T’s director will circulate an invitation letter in the next week or 2. The focus group is expected to meet every 3 months for about a year. Additional work needed after then would be folded into ITU-T study groups.