Verizon sees IPTV-over-IMS progress

Verizon Communications, whose FioS video service notably is not a full IPTV deployment, said today a recent global demonstration of IPTV-over-IMS demonstrated the promise of the technology for its own network, though barriers remain.

That was one of the more notable outcomes announced today as the Multi-Service Forum formally announced the results of its Global MultiService Interoperability (GMI) 2008 event, which was held in late October. The event spanned five service provider host labs – including Verizon’s – and included 22 vendors, 225 devices and more than 500 test plan permutations, all designed to validate the promise of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks and services.

Because the focus was on live testing of real-world services, Verizon’s feedback was noteworthy. In a recent interview with Telephony, Verizon CTO Mark Wegleitner said the service provider was already looking to move some broadcast video toward IPTV, such as infrequently-accessed long-tail-style content.

While declining to provide a time frame for the move to full IPTV, Verizon’s representative on the MSF board touted the progress made demonstrating IPTV as a service running over multi-vendor IMS-based networks in the October event, calling it the first live demo of that capability.

“Our objective is the use [of a single] infrastructure, perhaps adding some other network elements, to support the IPTV application,” said Naseem Khan, principle member of technical staff at Verizon. “In terms of viability [and] what additionally needs to be done, I believe QoS and policy management are areas where more work needs to be done.”

In the area of policy, Khan said Verizon is interested in working with standards groups like 3GPP and ATIS, the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, on a common policy management approach across wireline, broadband and wireless networks, ultimately reducing the costs of deploying and operating next-generation networks running multiple services.

The IPTV portion of the demonstration included tests of various soft clients, IPTV application server and video streaming servers. The demos tested linear broadcast TV, VOD (including pause and rewind) and networked personal video recorder services.