IPTV standards

A pan-European team has founded the

, an industry consortium that will work to define an interoperable end-to-end specification for delivery of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services.

Members of the Forum include Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung Siemens, Sony, and Telecom Italia.

The Open IPTV Forum will focus on the development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies, and help to maximize the benefits of IPTV for consumers, network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and infrastructure providers.

While standardization bodies are already addressing specific elements of IPTV, the Open IPTV Forum will work to aggregate today's diverse standards into a complete delivery solution, with the goal of accelerating the full standardization of IPTV-related technologies. The Open IPTV Forum plans to establish requirements and architecture specifications as well as protocol specifications later in 2007.

The evolving IPTV service is said to have many advantages, including personalization, interactivity and on-demand access for all forms of digital content. Unique possibilities exist for integration of content and communication services offered across mobile handsets and home devices. By ensuring the interoperability between consumer equipment and services compliant to the Open IPTV Forum's specification, end users can easily access their choice of contents and services among multiple service providers.

With this scope in mind, the Open IPTV Forum will work on the basis of suitable open-standards technologies, and will also address key technology elements such as content protection - necessary interfaces that allow IPTV services to be delivered over managed network environments and the internet - and adequate measures to ensure interoperability between such services and retail consumer devices.

Candidates include, but are not limited to IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA).

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