ATIS IIF To Develop Reference Framework for IPTV
Posted by Sachin Garg on 29th August 2005 | Permanent Link
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.
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 (see “Self-Provisioning, Self-Care Could Be the IPTV Differentiator,” page XX).
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.