After the 7th meeting of FG IPTV, it’s life was ended. The mission of FG IPTV is to coordinate and promote the development of global IPTV standards taking into account the existing work of the ITU study groups as well as Standards Developing Organizations, Fora and Consortia. 

 

In accordance with decisions taken at the April 2007 meeting of Study Group 13 the work of the IPTV Focus Group has ended and its documents have been transferred to the appropriate study groups via Study Group 13 for the development of draft Recommendations based on the focus group outputs as appropriate and for the continuation of the work on the unfinished topics.

 

Based on proposals developed by the chairman of Study Group 13 and the chairman of the IPTV Focus Group and endorsed by TSAG the ongoing work will be carried out under the umbrella of a Global Standards Initiative (the IPTV-GSI). The ongoing work on the outputs from the IPTV Focus Group will be done by the study groups (based on allocations developed by the IPTV-JCA) with coordinated planning of the activities and through co-located meetings of the involved rapporteur groups to progress certain areas of the work as appropriate.

 

As part of the establishment of the IPTV-GSI the membership of the IPTV-JCA is being extended to include other standards organizations involved with the ITU-T in the IPTV work stemming from the results of the IPTV Focus Group. Also an IPTV-GSI Technical and Strategic Review (TSR) process has been set up. This will operate at every IPTV-GSI event (Study Group meetings and co-located rapporteur meetings) and will bring to the IPTV-JCA any issues requiring guidance or recommendations for action, e.g., concerning work allocation. Mr Ghassem Koleyni (Nortel Networks, Canada) has been appointed as the TSR coordinator.

 

The following is the announcement of ITU on Dec 18. 2007 about the set of standards of IPTV:

 

ITU announces first global set of standards for IPTV

Specifications will fuel market for next-generation services

Geneva, 18 December 2007 — The International Telecommunication Union announced the first set of global standards for Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) today. The standards were built with technical contributions from leading service providers and manufacturers from the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and cement ITU’s role as the global leader in IPTV standards development.

IPTV is one of the most highly visible services to emerge as part of the development of next-generation networks (NGN). Indeed, it is seen as both the business case and principal driver for accelerating deployment of NGN.

The new standards were developed by the Focus Group on IPTV (FG IPTV) in ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T).

Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau said, "Standards are crucial for IPTV to reach its market potential and global audience. They are necessary in order to give service providers — whether traditional broadcasters, ISPs, cable operators or telecoms service providers — control over their platforms and their offerings. Standards here will encourage innovation, help mask the complexity of services, guarantee quality of service, ensure interoperability and, ultimately, help players remain competitive."

This announcement follows the seventh and final meeting of FG IPTV hosted in Malta by the Maltese Ministry for Competitiveness and Communications. Censu Galea, Minister for Competitiveness and Communications said, "The stage of work that sees completion this week lays the groundwork for an area of ICT that some predict could attract up to 100 million subscribers in the next three years. It’s easy to see why so many of the world’s key ICT companies have been keen to progress this work in ITU. Malta is proud to host this event and play a part in advancing this important technology."

Contained within the documents produced by the Focus Group are the high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services. ITU’s next phase of IPTV work — IPTV-GSI (global standards initiative) — will centre on the speedy preparation of standards based on documents produced by FG IPTV as well as on the detailed protocols required.

The 2006−2007 period has seen numerous physical and electronic meetings and workshops progressing work on IPTV around the world. Twenty-one documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service (QoS), security, digital rights management (DRM), unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks will be submitted to the ITU-T Study Group charged with progressing and distributing the work. The IPTV-GSI will build on the momentum generated over the past 20 months, and it is foreseen that contributions and participation will continue to increase.

Operators consider IPTV a key element of a triple-play package of voice, video and data services. Standardization is imperative if service providers are to offer high quality products with value-additions, such as video-on-demand services that will inevitably drive the market. A combination of voice, Internet and video services over a single broadband link and from a single provider is foreseen as the ultimate goal of the broadband revolution.

FG IPTV benefited from collaboration with all ITU-T Study Groups and other forums and regional standards bodies, including ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), DSL Forum, the DVB project, ETSI TISPAN and the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI).

The first meeting of IPTV-GSI will convene in Seoul, Republic of Korea from 15 to 22 January 2008.