June 6 and 7, 2005 Beijing, China

The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA), the international alliance whose mission it is to accelerate the adoption and deployment of open standards for streaming rich media over IP, today disclosed details of the 17th ISMA Forum to be held on June 6 and 7 in Beijing, China. The location of the forum was specifically selected to accommodate a meeting between the ISMA and the Chinese Audio & Video Standard Working Group, or AVS, on June 8. The AVS working group was created to develop and promote homegrown standards for video and audio compression for expanding digital multimedia markets in China.

Participants representing over 30 global companies will learn about the vision and strategic direction of both organizations, as well as ongoing technical initiatives that will impact the evolution of delivering Internet-based streamed content to a host of devices for a variety of applications. Members will present technical updates in the areas of digital rights management, enterprise applications, high efficiency transport, coding advances to improve video quality, including fine granularity scalability (FGS) and error resilience, and many other topics.

Much of the meeting will also focus on ways in which the US-based trade association and Chinese standards body may more closely align their respective standards implementations for greater complementarity. “AVS has largely focused on providing a standard for video coding that will benefit the Chinese market,” explains Yuval Fisher, ISMA board member from Envivio, Inc. “Although ISMA also defines implementations for audio and video coding, it equally specifies IP delivery through its existing specifications. Each organization has substantial contributions to bring to the table, and we’re confident that by engaging in these discussions we’ll eventually produce a consistent set of system standards to improve interoperability while reducing complexities and cost.”

Other areas of exploration include IPTV, which has steadily been gaining attention in many areas of the world. China’s first license for deploying IPTV services was recently granted. A separate service provider under China’s Central Television (CCTV) also deploys services in eight provinces in a country with over 400 million TV sets. ISMA members are also investigating open standards-based implementations for IPTV, as well as for other online video distribution systems.

ISMA holds quarterly meetings hosted by member companies. Meeting locations alternate between North America, Europe, and Asia. The meetings offer the opportunity for technical committees to collaborate face-to-face on ongoing work items several times per year. Member companies often use Forum meetings as a place to hold extensive interoperability testing. The organization frequently has guest speakers present on a variety of industry topics, and encourages non-member companies to audit meetings.

Following the ISMA Forum and ISMA-AVS seminar, AVS will host a 3-day meeting beginning June 9. For additional details about the events and registration information for companies who wish to participate as auditors, click here.