A recent survey of people who had requested the IPTV-related specifications developed by the industry trade association ISMA (Internet Streaming Media Alliance) revealed that nearly two thirds have implemented the open-standard work in a product or plan to do so. Since only 10 percent of the responses came from ISMA members, the results indicate the broad-ranging acceptance of the Alliance’s technical approach and reflect the critical need for open standard specifications to support the IPTV industry.

With the sizeable non-member response to the 4,300 questionnaires that were sent, the results also can be seen as reflecting the IPTV market in general, according to Yuval Fisher, ISMA director and chief scientist at Envivio, Inc.

Almost a third of those who said they are incorporating the ISMA specification into a product chose this solution because it was an open standard, followed by those who cited the product integration, flexibility and scalability the work provided. The most popular uses of the ISMA specifications were in players, live encoder servers, and other types of servers and encoders. A geographical breakdown showed the largest number of responses coming from Europe, followed by Asia and then North America.

The high rate of conversion from requested specification into actual product deployments indicate the ISMA technical work is highly regarded in the international community. ISMA is seen as a source for open standards, especially for Digital Rights Management (DRM) with its ISMACryp specifications, said Fisher.

“The results speak volumes about the need for integrated, open standard solutions to defray the cost and risks associated with developing IPTV systems. This is also the reason many of our members have joined the organization and have been supporting the technical work. These companies have derived important insights and benefits from their efforts in working together to develop open standards,” Fisher said.

The questionnaire was sent in July to people who had requested ISMA specifications since the fall of 2004 asking them if they had used the material; if so, how the specification had been deployed; and why they selected the ISMA solution. The survey was based on the five specifications the organization had released as a final publication at the time, including ISMA 1.0 and 2.0 providing an interoperable IP video and audio framework, ISMACryp 1.0 and 1.1 defining end-to-end content encryption, and ISMA Closed Captioning.

A detailed summary of the survey results is available at www.ISMA.tv.