Deployment of Internet protocol television (IPTV) is gaining momentum around the world. There are many factors at work contributing to growth of IPTV. Various players including traditional telcos are now adding media delivery to their service portfolio to increase their wireline valuation and average revenue per user (ARPU). Along with broadband deployment, telcos are eager to deploy interactive applications such as IPTV to enhance revenues and user experience. As communications space is converging, even multi service operators (MSO) are adding two way communications capabilities to their last mile access adopting DOCSIS or FTTx technologies. Faster development in the compression technologies such as H.264 is allowing delivery of high quality content over broadband. Worldwide increase in volumes of IP set top boxes (STB) has brought prices within reasonable range for many operators to consider IPTV deployment. Inclusion of digital rights management (DRM) and content protection systems into the IPTV ecosystem has given reasonable comfort to content providers and broadcasters to allow their content distributed via IPTV platform.

As per ITU-T, IPTV is defined as multimedia services such as television, video, audio, text, graphics, and data delivered over IP-based networks, managed to provide the required level of quality of service (QoS), quality of experience (QoE), security, interactivity, and reliability. In short, IPTV can enable delivery of a host of interactive services that provide experience of convergence of Internet, communication, multimedia, and entertainment via TV screen.

IPTV ecosystem can be broadly classified under five components:

• Encoders

• Streaming servers

• Middleware

• CAS/DRM

• Set top box (STB)

IPTV continues to emerge as a serious competing technology to cable and satellite television. IPTV has potential to bring benefits of true convergence to the end user and the benefits can be ensured by having proper standardization of above components and services offered.

Snapshot of standardization on IPTV components

Encoders: They are usually based on well accepted video compression technologies such as MPEG2 and MPEG 4. Hence the interoperability is being taken care of. However due to availability of reverse path in IPTV for interactive applications, the encoders apart from encoding tend to provide other services such as teletext, ad-insertion, and multiple audio for which standardization needs to be in place. At this time enablement of these additional functionalities require tedious interoperability testing between vendor's equipment.

Streaming server: Apart from common consensus on networking protocol and technologies such as IGMP and multicasting, the streaming server implementation is still proprietary in nature and needs standards to enable interoperability. Many operators tend to delay deployment of IPTV in fear of sinking money into proprietary technology and to avoid single vendor dependency.

Middleware: There are no guidelines available on the middleware functionality; hence different vendors have adopted different technologies to please the end-customer. Many a time operators and vendors get into costly exercise of customizing middleware for a single deployment.

CAS/DRM: CAS/DRM is used to ensure the security and digital rights management of content. The CAS/DRM requirements are more or less governed by the broadcaster and vary from region to region. This part of the ecosystem is well defined as compared to middleware.

Set top box: Set top box is a key element in the IPTV ecosystem. It does decoding of content and is also responsible for authorizing the valid user. Decoder portion of STB is standardized; however, other functionalities have proprietary implementation. Most vendors have moved to OEM model where STB HW in design is much governed by chipset vendors and their reference design. IPTV vendors are mostly porting their middleware and DRM/CAS application client onto STB. This provides flexibility to operators in choosing different vendors for the STB.

IPTV platform can deliver convergence of communication, broadcasting, entertainment and information services. However, there are separate regulators and separate rules are in place for each of these services. There are various agencies and governing bodies who are working in tandem to provide standardization of these parts. The need of the hour is to have a single body that can carry out the gap analysis, form a global consensus, devise a regulatory framework, and come up with global standards.

Currently, following study items on IPTV standardization are being looked at. These include:

Technical Issues:

• Network and service architecture, protocol and systems including query/navigation, and QoS delivery

• Service scenarios, end user equipment, service/application platforms, and operation/management

• Audio/video coding, security, browsing, storage and database.

Regulatory Issues:

• Transport carriers, service providers, and content providers.

• Charging and billing

• Interworking and inter-connection issues among various operators/providers.

ITU-T Focus group has identified following areas which need to be standardized. These include IPTV services, signaling and network control, transport capabilities and network aspects, media processing, codec and service control, security, QoS and network performance, OAM and management, traffic control, and accounting and charging.

Finally, it is important to have local business and technical requirements in mind and realities should be considered while adopting standards. Global standards should not be the summation of all regional standards; however, regional standards should have global flavor plus region specific needs incorporated.