The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has announced the first set of global standards for Internet Protocol TV (IPTV). Work on the standards began in April 2006.
The standards developed by the ITU’s Focus Group on IPTV (FG IPTV) include high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services. That means there is still a great deal of work left to do before a full set of global IPTV standards are available.
The ITU said the next steps will include submitting 21 documents – covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service (QoS), security, digital rights management (DRM), unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks – to another ITU-T Study Group.
FG IPTV has been collaborating with all ITU-T study groups and other forums and regional standards bodies, including ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), the DSL Forum, the DVB project, ETSI TISPAN and the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI).