Questions & Answers
Which companies are the founding companies in the Forum?
Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Nokia Siemens Networks, Sony and Telecom Italia are the founding members. The Forum is open to additional participation.
What is the reason for founding the Open IPTV Forum?
The founding members of the Open IPTV Forum believe that open standardization is important to promote IPTV (Interactive Personalized TV) market growth and to maximize benefits for consumers, network operators, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers, content providers and infrastructure providers.
The founding members of the Forum recognize that in order to accelerate the standardization of IPTV-related technologies, the participation of leading players from different segments of this industry is essential. In particular, the active participation of the consumer electronics vendors is critical in order to enable a mass market of IPTV-ready retail consumer equipment. The founding members have established the Open IPTV Forum to create an interoperable end-to-end specification for personalized and interactive IPTV, and jointly advocate such technologies to relevant standardization bodies.
What is the main target of Open IPTV Forum?
The evolving IPTV service has advantages because it brings interactivity and personalization. There are also unique possibilities to integrate content and communication services, as well as services that are offered across mobile terminals and home devices marketed through retail channels.
The Forum will specify a common and open end-to-end
platform for supplying variety of internet multimedia
and IPTV services to retail based consumer equipment,
either over QoS-controlled managed network or over the
public Internet.
This will be based on standards developed by other
organization, identifying gaps and profiling for
end-to-end solutions.
How will this benefit end-users?
By ensuring the interoperability between a broad base of consumer equipment and services compliant to the Forum’s specifications, the end-users can easily access their choice of contents and services without confusion among multiple service providers.
What is the time plan to achieve the target?
- Requirements and architecture specifications are available on the Open IPTV Forum homepage under publications.
- A first release of protocol specifications is available as above.
- The solution specification release 1 is planned to be ready August 2008.
How are you planning to achieve this?
Forum members will work on an aggressive schedule to develop specifications. The results will be available in several releases. They will make use of the work done in existing standards bodies, where these are applicable. The results of the Forums’ work will be fed to ongoing standardization activities through member contributions.
What is unique to this Forum compared to the existing standardization bodies? What will be the major added-value?
This Forum is unique at least in the following five ways. First, the Forum consists of key players worldwide from the telecom service industry, the network infrastructure equipment industry and the consumer electronics industry. Second, while there are many standardization bodies that address IPTV, they are addressing selected parts of IPTV and no one is addressing the complete solution. The Open IPTV Forum intends to fill the gaps between the islands of standardization Third, the Forum is focused on implementation of the specifications for the actual services and device developments in a timely manner. And fourth, the Forum members will work closely with the existing standardization efforts, and address those areas which need enhancements in existing standards by actively contributing the work of the Forum. Finally the Forum will consider to work on compliance to ensure interoperability.
Is Open IPTV Forum open to any member?
Yes, it is open for participation by companies that share the goals of the Forum and are willing to actively contribute to specification development. Please find the details under the membership folder on the website.
Continuously updated information will be made available on this web site.
Which standardization bodies are working with IPTV and what's the status today?
There are many standardization bodies that address IPTV. However they are addressing selected parts of IPTV and not one is addressing the complete solution with the necessary speed. It is essential to find a way to bridge the different islands of standardization in order to accelerate market deployments. Examples of existing and related standardization bodies are: 3GPP, TISPAN, ATIS IIF, OMA, DVB DLNA, HGI, ITU-T, and DSL Forum.
Have you already approached some of these bodies? What has been the reaction?
Now that the Forum has been established, contacts with standardization development organizations will be established primarily through contributions from the Open IPTV Forum members
Are you also planning to work with IT companies?
All companies that can and wants to contribute toward the objectives of the Open IPTV Forum are welcome to apply.
What about content providers?
Content providers, broadcasters and producers are equally welcome to apply.
How is IMS important for IPTV and how will the standard be used in this Forum's specifications?
We expect IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based infrastructure and services to be broadly deployed by network operators. Since IPTV will be part of the multimedia services offered over these networks, it is natural for the Forum to consider IMS technologies as candidate elements of its specification, especially in the area of managed networks.
IMS already offers solutions for key enablers in the Forum’s scope, such as the blending of communication and entertainment services, QoS delivery, a common transport control layer which enables TV & Video services over hybrid access networks and a converged platform for mobile and fixed services to interact. These functions will play a key role in enhancing the end user’s personalized and interactive IPTV experience, help increase customer satisfaction through convergence of fixed and increase the value of products and services to users.
How is DLNA important for IPTV?
Home Networks are an important part of an end-to-end IPTV solution. The specifications by DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) address interoperability of mobile, PC and consumer electronic devices in seamlessly sharing digital media services across a home network. With more than 250 members ranging from manufacturers, software and application developers, hardware vendors, and retailers to content providers, DLNA is broadly supported by industry. It is thus natural for the Forum to consider DLNA technologies as candidate elements of its specification, when it comes to specifying the delivery of IPTV services over home networks.
DLNA provides an ideal solution where consumers can enjoy digital media, video, audio and image, regardless of the source, with any device in the home.
Will the Forum work only with wireline IPTV?
The Forum will define an end-to-end IPTV solution independent of access technologies. Support of multiple accesses is a key feature of the IPTV solution to be defined by the Forum. Blending of communication services with IPTV services is expected to create new, exciting user experience and will be addressed.
How were the founding member companies selected?
In the past several months, the companies entered into intensive discussions on what was needed to accelerate IPTV standardization and timely expand the market globally. The founding companies came to an agreement on working together on this task. We believe that combining the expertise of key telecom operators, consumer electronics manufacturers and network infrastructure providers will drive this task in the most efficient manner.
When will the Forum specification-compliant CE devices be marketed?
It is not the intent of the Forum, to define roll-out plans for any products. Each company should comment on its own product plans. Yes, the participation in the Forum indicates the support of the members to participate with products and solutions in the respective market