IPTV Standards Pave the Way to Richer Experiences

Carriers have a real chance to compel content providers to pay more attention to their services than those of cable or satellite companies. With the new domain of interactive advertising emerging, RBOCs will be sitting on very valuable data about viewing and purchasing transactions that occur over their IP networks.

To take advantage of data detailing what content subscribers viewed, when they changed channels and during what content they remained focused or changed to other content, carriers will need a feedback loop to content providers or goods providers. This link will be the key to creative promotions and business opportunities.

Those promotions will open the door to a new world of services: MP3s could be downloaded from set-top boxes to home entertainment centers. VoD services could push promotions for pizza and soft drink deliveries. Using their TVs, viewers could order clothing worn by the actors they’re watching.

Such possibilities are exciting, but the ability to bill and analyze the data will be crucial.

“For rich, multimedia services to come to be provisioned and billed, carriers’ [billing and OSS/BSS] must procure data that is network- and transaction-oriented,” says Bob Larribeau, program director for IPTV at the Multimedia Research Group. “Clearly, transactional and e-commerce activities will require carriers to form relationships with content providers and third parties possessing goods people want. The TV will have to do everything a cell phone can do, and more.”

That means, for instance, taking payments for goods and services, or enabling subscribers to use their TV bills as a credit card. To manage the complex accounting and billing between carriers and subscribers, as well as wholesale relationships with third parties, standards must evolve to where usage data can be captured to monitor penetration rates and customer life cycles.

The Birth of IPTV Standards

Verizon, AT&T and others deploying on-demand services and time-shift programming are joining forces with key vendors under the auspices of IPDR.org.

The organization has launched an industry-wide initiative for IPTV-related billing and accounting standards. For accounting and billing, the ties to IPDR will be key to revenue assurance and analytics that drive new-age advertising and customer life cycle management.

In IPDRs, evidence of events is kept constant and consistent with billing information so that carriers can monitor usage patterns and profiles.

“The value of IPDR is that it separates data formats from service description from the transport, trying to optimize each domain,” says Stoyan Kenderov, chief technology evangelist with Amdocs, an IPDR member.

“Accounting and reconciliation have to be extremely efficient and have minimal impact on service elements in the network,” says Kenderov. He notes that with an STB, the footprint and capabilities are limited; that can pose problems, since IPTV generates more events than any other service—even Internet surfing. “You have a range of 40 to 160 events happening over four hours of TV viewing,” he says, “so IPDR is necessary to execute and track functions efficiently—such as menu browsing, channel changes, VoD purchases, advertisements viewed or not viewed.”

After capture, there must be a standard way to transmit the information to back-end systems for some type of response.

“At some point, the IPTV provider will know a profile for a user as they go through their guide, and the middleware will push ads targeted to that user onto their screen,” Kenderov says. “That must be streamed from the front end.” There are no dominant STB players, he says, so leadership will have to come from standardization.

Unlike traditional accounting protocols, IPDR has moved from file-based to streaming protocols that allow events to come in quickly and flexibly.

“With the emerging standards, companies can describe complex contracts with multiple partners in a flexible way so that settlement and assurance can happen in real time,” says Kenderov. “Additionally, IPDR provides for efficient binary encoding, which mitigates the overhead associated with older formats.”

‘More Than Just Billing’

Going forward, the consortium is looking at how IPTV will drive convergence of systems and optimization of network capacity, billing, customer care and multi-party settlement.

Because carriers will be dealing with multimedia content, QoS, revenue sharing and multiple currencies from multiple sources, they will have to obtain a different set of data. Systems will have to be aware of each transaction, so that authorization or refusal of service can become dynamic or real-time. That means flow-through provisioning and real-time billing will come to the fore.

“This is all about more than just billing, as downstream systems like CRM need user behavior data to trend usage patterns so product managers can offer packages based on how customers use data,” says Kelly Anderson, IPDR president and COO.

For that reason, IPDR has concentrated on getting general IP requirements out, such as transport protocols for IP transactions. “We’re focusing on requirements for systems that use or absorb network data—things like fraud management, traffic analysis, billing systems, settlement systems, and so on,” says Anderson. She notes that IPDR is currently evaluating, from a purely IPTV perspective, the downstream systems that use network data. “There might be more settlement around content providers and advertisers that need real-time or near real-time network data to get feedback on content for revenue sharing purposes,” she says.

Streaming Protocol

That could be where IPDR’s Streaming Protocol standard comes into play. In fact, IPDR’s accounting and usage requirements for IPTV stem from the work it conducted on its Streaming Protocol—contributed as technology through its strategic liaison with ATIS, which in September announced its QoS Metrics initiative via the IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF). Thus far, IPDR’s Streaming Protocol work has been incorporated into the ATIS Telecom Management and Operations Committee’s work, which has further standardized it as a Trial-Use American National Standard, ATIS-PP-0300075.1.200X, August 2005. It has also been incorporated into DOCSIS 2.0 documentation from CableLabs. IPDR.org will be working with CableLabs, which has outlined the Record Keeping Server (RKS) mechanism to standardize processing and billing. Most recently, the work has been harmonized with the 3GPP IMS architecture and protocols for a joint submission to the ITU-T Next Generation Network (NGN) Management focus group of Study Group 4. This submission will include unique technology to address the Supplier/Partner Settlement needs of NGN solutions. IPDR.org has been working on this latter application for three years and has also offered it as technology through its ATIS relationship.

The Streaming Protocol could foster an environment for expedited, reliable delivery of all data, such as data records from service elements to mediation, OSS or BSS. Anderson says IPDR will focus on “the critical needs for exporting high volumes of data records from the service element with efficient use of network, storage and processing resources.”

To develop its usage measurement standard for IPTV, IPDR is taking into consideration legacy mobile billing facilitated by automated message accounting (AMA), CIBER and Transferred Account Procedures (TAP)—all important for convergent networks.

“While there are many mechanisms for exporting usage information, they are proving inadequate to support IPTV and other next-gen services,” Anderson says. “So we are looking for input about how service elements are used to export usage information to mediation and BSS to facilitate accounting.”

Currently usage data exists in service elements as log files, such as CDRs, to be exported to external systems in batches. “For IPTV applications that require real-time functionality, that process will be inadequate,” says Anderson.

IPDR also will look into the extensibility problems that stem from the RADIUS protocol’s limited attribute and command space. Additionally, it will study the current DIAMETER protocol and its extensions focusing on Internet and wireless network access, which does not adequately address some critical elements for an accounting protocol, such as efficiency and performance.

“In the next couple of months, we will be looking at the architecture of data requirements and technologies on which IPTV-gassed networks will rely to offer IPTV services,” says Anderson, who believes IPTV protocols will go beyond just IPTV. “They could affect acceptance of other services, such as VoIP, which present accounting challenges.”

The hope is that IPDR, along with organizations like ATIS, could produce an industry-wide standard for both IPTV and VoIP by the end of this year.