The forum, which is fully open to participation across the communications and entertainment industries, will focus on development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies, and help to maximize the benefits of IPTV for consumers, network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and infrastructure providers.
While standardization bodies are already addressing specific elements of IPTV, the pan-industry Open IPTV Forum will work to aggregate today’s diverse standards into a complete delivery solution, with the goal of accelerating the full standardization of IPTV-related technologies.
The forum plans to establish requirements and architecture specifications, as well as protocol specifications, later in 2007.
The Open IPTV Forum will work on the basis of suitable open-standards technologies, and will also address key technology elements such as content protection, necessary interfaces that allow IPTV services to be delivered over both managed network environment and the public internet, and adequate measures to ensure interoperability between such services and retail consumer devices.
Initially, the forum will consist of the founding member companies, but will be open to other companies at a later date.
