AT&T Inc., Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung Siemens, Sony, and Telecom Italia today announced the founding of the Open IPTV Forum, an industry consortium that will work to define an interoperable end-to-end specification for delivery of IPTV services.
Initially the Forum will consist of the founding member companies, but will be open for other companies at a later date. The Open IPTV industry forum will focus on development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies. By aggregating today’s diverse standards into a complete delivery solution.
The Open IPTV Forum plans to establish requirements and architecture specifications as well as protocol specifications later in 2007.
The Open IPTV Forum says it 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. Candidates include, but are not limited to: IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA).