Approximately 80 participants representing 70 leading telecom carriers and vendors came together in Washington last week for the launch of the IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF).

ATIS' Board of Directors created the IIF this summer after an exploratory group identified key technology areas requiring standards as wide-scale industry deployment of IPTV becomes a reality.

These technical impediments include: the need for an overall reference architecture for IPTV; the need for industry-accepted standardized metrics and requirements for content security and the quality of content delivery; the need for end-to-end QoS functionality to support multiple services on the same network; and the need for interoperability standards and testing of components in the video delivery network.

The IIF has created four task forces to address these needs: Architecture (ARCH); Digital Rights Management (DRM); Quality of Service and Metrics (QoSM); and Testing and Interoperability (T&I).

Three of the four groups met this week to adopt initial issues for work and setting target completion dates; outline issue documentation and assign responsibilities; and identify other organizations to contact for collaboration.

"Standardization is critical to IPTV's long-term success," said Kevin Schneider, ATIS board member and CTO of ADTRAN. "The work done in the IIF will allow the industry to converge on common architectures and interfaces. The specifications can be used across the range of companies involved in providing IPTV service – including content providers, carriers, software and middleware companies and equipment providers – to bring a long-lived, engaging product to the consumer."

Some of the activities begun this week by the IIF task forces include: developing requirements for IPTV service architectures; developing server and client-side requirements for digital rights management; and identifying the appropriate metrics needed to define the quality of the IPTV service in areas varying from frequency and timing synchronization to video quality.

For more information about the IIF, visit www.atis.org/iif.