ATIS gathers IPTV troops

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions today announced that it has completed the first meeting of its IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), forming four separate task forces to tackle specific issues.

The IIF is charged with identifying key technology areas that will require standards for wide-scale industry deployment of IPTV. In June, the ATIS’ board of directors formed an exploratory committee to determine whether the organization should get involved in any standards work.

“We basically defined what IPTV was for the scope of ATIS and that included the secure and reliable delivery of video,” said Kevin Schneider, CTO of Adtran, who co-chaired the exploratory group along with Surewest CTO Bill DeMuth. “This is broader that video over DSL. It also includes fiber access and wireless access.”

About 80 participants from 70 carriers and vendors met in Washington this week as part of the first IIF meeting. Schneider said representatives from all four former RBOCs were present at the first meeting as was most vendors already producing IPTV-related equipment.

“I would say that, in terms of network equipment providers and middleware providers, we had the majority of the industry at least as far as the U.S. is concerned,” he said.

The main development out of this week’s meeting was the formation of four task forces: Architecture; Digital Rights Management; Quality of Service and Metrics; and Testing and Interoperability. The first three met this week and adopted initial work issues and target dates while the testing and interoperability group will wait for the other three to develop recommendations.

Of the four task forces, ATIS recognized that DRM would be among the more sensitive and is thus limited its scope, Schneider said.

“We’re going to limit this to terminating devices in the customer premises, and not extend it to the redistribution of content by the consumer to other devices,” he said.

Additionally, the group will not be looking at inter-carrier content distribution, a practice that many independent have adopted but content providers are vehemently against.

“The initial focus if from service provider to consumer and not service provider to service provider,” Schneider said, noting that the company will consult with content producers on the issue. “We have no intent of developing something that content providers find unacceptable.”