I.T.U. Develops IPTV Standards

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced a set of global standards for IPTV.





The new standards, which were developed by the Focus Group on IPTV (FG IPTV) in ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), include high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services.



Twenty-one documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service (QoS), security, digital rights management (DRM), unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks will be submitted to the ITU-T Study Group charged with progressing and distributing the work.



The Focus Group on IPTV said it benefited from collaboration with all ITU-T Study Groups and other forums and regional standards bodies, including ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), DSL Forum, the DVB project, ETSI TISPAN and the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI).



ITU's next phase of IPTV work -- IPTV-GSI (global standards initiative) -- will centre on the speedy preparation of standards based on documents produced by FG IPTV as well as on the detailed protocols required. The first meeting of IPTV-GSI will convene in Seoul, Republic of Korea from 15 to 22 January 2008.

http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/IPTV/