ATIS announced in June the formation of the IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) to develop ATIS standards and related technical and operations activities that will foster interoperability, interconnection and implementation of IPTV systems and services, including video on demand and interactive TV services.
Largely responsible for the creation of IIF is the ATIS IPTV Exploratory Group (IEG), which deemed standards work necessary after meeting with a myriad of companies, including service providers such as BT, BellSouth and SureWest, and vendors such as HP, Amdocs and Telcordia. It became evident to the IEG members that a reference IPTV architecture would help carriers handle content security, interoperability standards, testing requirements for components, outage management, QoS, path establishment and user expectations.
"Because there exists no reference model for the entire IPTV application, we thought it best that a reference model be defined, so that interfaces can be developed that work with elements to enable a plug-and-play environment," says Kevin Schneider, CTO at Adtran Inc. and an IEG co-chair, pointing to the fact the reference architecture will focus on various elements, such as QoS, DRM, encoders, decoders, STBs, DSLAMs and VoD systems, and where they fit into different service provider models. "Industry-level acceptance is needed," Schneider says, "as components of the architecture will vary with hand-offs and delivery mechanisms."
For example, measuring QoS would be simplified if there were some sort of guide to how the quality of content delivery hinges on different formats, bandwidth capabilities and compression algorithms.
"If there is less bandwidth per channel over a DSL network, there are compression algorithms that could enable the same fidelity," says Schneider, noting that assurance will be a big part of IPTV delivery.
Currently, such guidelines are arbitrary, rather than tailored to whether a service provider is using MPEG0-2 or MPEG-4 with different bit rates for video streams.
"This has to become more like the voice world, where standard metrics exist through ETSI," Schneider says. He believes something analogous to MOSK scores in economics will be employed to measure quality of video independent of compression mechanisms.
Schneider expects that billing will be an important part of the reference model, but the charter will reinforce the importance of "reuse" when incorporating interfaces—whether to billing or OSS. "We will develop wherever there are holes," he says, "but we will try to use existing elements as much as possible."
BellSouth's CTO, Bill Smith, a co-chair of the ATIS board, believes a framework would help in his work to evolve existing billing and OSS or to swap them out. "We have work under way to assess billing and OSS, so what happens with IIF in defining and specifying interfaces of front- and back-end systems will be important for opening up vendor supply and sourcing of all those components," says Smith, noting that in cable, conditional access is pretty closed. "The goal is to have integrated IPTV solutions that enable customers to program their TVs from any device, which would then integrate into TiVo systems or VCRs, set-top boxes or other devices," adds Smith.
As a participant in Microsoft's early-adopter program, Smith anticipates the roll-out of compelling services once BellSouth can enable manipulation of program guides from multiple access devices. "We don't want to be captive to anyone," he says, "so we will push all vendors to have open interfaces."
His view, and that of the IIF, is to attract big players like Microsoft. It's possible, as Microsoft, with Windows Media 9 series, seems to be working more with standards organizations.
As the framework is developed, ATIS will seek expertise not only from vendors working in the physical layer, but the application layer as well. "We need to go into the set-top boxes from the head-ends to be assured of performance with individual components," Schneider says.
"Our focus will fall in large part on the middleware," he says, "and then we'll go down from there." Schneider notes that Myrio (now a part of Siemens) already is an active part of the IIF's framework effort. "Middleware encompasses billing functions, electronic program guides, interfaces to content providers—everything that ties to an application," he says.
Of course, acknowledging the physical layer will be necessary, since attributes like bursty noise may become a problem with IPTV. "The application needs to be aware of the characteristics of DSL, for example, so we'll be working with other forums that relate to what we will be doing with the architecture," says Schneider. He says the ITU, IETF, IEEE, DSL Forum, Video Services Forum and Digital Video Broadcast Forum may all get involved in the IIF effort. "There just has to be a central place where this can all converge," he says, "and that is what we are hoping to do with the IIF."
As a means to that end, IIF will coordinate standards activities, including communication with outside groups; developing interoperability agreements, technical reports and ATIS standards; and providing the venue for interoperability activities and the assessment of IPTV issues in the context of next-generation networks (NGN).
The IIF will be holding another meeting in mid-September to further hone its plans for the framework.
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