IPTV lets you stream video content to your television using your homes broadband connection. Companies like Akimbo have complete programming around this technology. At CES this year we saw a sneak peek of a new IPTV service from SBC that lets you stream video content to multiple televisions in the house using a single broadband connection. With IPTV taking off, it makes sense to create a standards board.
The ATIS Board of Directors launched the IIF at its quarterly meeting Thursday on the recommendation of the ATIS IPTV Exploratory Group (IEG), which was formed in April to examine the technical issues surrounding the successful wide-scale deployment of IPTV.
The scope of the IIF includes: coordination of standards activities for IPTV technologies, including acting as a liaison with outside groups; development of 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).
Initial objectives of the IIF will include: the creation of an industry overall reference architecture for IPTV; content security; interoperability standards and testing requirements for components; restoration after outages; QoS; path establishment; reliability and robustness of service components; the establishment of user expectations; and more.
