Telco Industry Begins IPTV Standards Process

As the telecommunications industry starts work on standards, it seems focused on competing with cable, ignoring the television that's already available on the internet.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [September 20, 2005]

The Washington, D.C.-based Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Standards is one of many (see links) that enable equipment makers and telecom providers to work together to ensure that everybody's products work together.

Setting standards can be political. Everyone wants to be the next Microsoft, owning intellectual property used all over the world, raking in the royalties. Recently, ATIS held its first meeting to decide standards for IPTV.

Duopoly at work
The ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), held September 13 to 14 in Washington, D.C., brought together 70 equipment makers and telecom providers as well as the FCC. In the emerging telco-cableco duopoly, we expect to see cable industry groups and telco industry groups create pairs of competing standards for the services of the future, and IPTV is just one instance of this.

The IIF has four task forces: Architecture (ARCH), Digital Rights Management (DRM), Quality of Service and Metrics (QoSM), and Testing and Interoperability (T&I).

The DRM task force will run into obvious political issues. Kevin Schneider, ATIS board member and CTO of ADTRAN, who led a webinar reporting on the IIF meeting, admitted, "we have no intent of developing something content providers find unacceptable."

As a first step in placating the content providers, the IIF DRM task force has promised not to enable sharing to on premises devices other than the set top box. We believe this means that telco IPTV will not be computer friendly. In fact, we suspect it may look like the box from ITVN that we saw this week (and which Gerry Blackwell will write about later this year) that has an Ethernet in jack and RCA out jacks, bypassing the computer completely.

Hammer, nail, foot, floor
Just as open source voice (like Asterisk) and closed source free voice (like Skype) have been competing well with more traditionally structured companies, we expect to see the emergence of unusual forms of IPTV. Already the leader in the PVR market is encountering skepticism. For example, Cory Doctorow (sci-fi author, blogger, and EFF guru) notes that TiVO can prevent set top box owners from storing recorded content (see Could "noise" cause a TiVo to block recording? Experts say no) and recommends building your own PVR instead (see Build your own PVR and get a TV that you really 0wn!).

Television is not as well developed as voice and PVRs, but it's getting there. Broadband Reports manager and cluesome author Karl Bode writes (in Shaw: Crippling a Race Horse), that broadband offerings aimed at high bandwidth users also come with bandwidth caps that prevent them from downloading their favorite shows, which run to 300 MB each. Cable companies like Canada's Shaw have a clear motive to prevent their customers from truly adopting internet television. Will the telcos, when they have completed their own walled garden IPTV systems, fall into the same trap?

While cable and telco executives focus on competing with each other, they will find themselves unprepared to compete with the far more dynamic and entrepreneurial internet, offering more TV over IP than they ever will. If there's a race, they will have already nailed their feet to the floor.

List of IIF attendees

• Accenture—ARCH co-chair
• ADC
• ADTRAN—Kevin Schneider, Convener
• Agilent Technologies
• Alcatel
• Amdocs
• AT&T
• Bell Canada
• BellSouth—ARCH co-chair
• Bigband Networks
• Bitband
• British Telecom
• Capgemini
• Ciena Corp
• Cingular Wireless
• Cisco Systems
• Comporium
• ContentGuard
• Corrigent Systems
• Digeo
• Digisoft TV LTD
• Dolby Labs
• ECI Telecom
• Entrisphere
• Ericsson
• Evolving Systems, Inc.
• Fujitsu Network Communications
• Harris
• Hewlett-Packard
• Imake Software Services
• IneoQuest Technologies, Inc.
• Intec
• Intel
• IPDR
• Irdeto
• JDSU (formerly Acterna)—QoSM co-chair
• Juniper Networks
• Leapstone Systems, Inc.
• Lucent Technologies
• Marconi
• MicroSoft
• mPhase
• Motorola
• Myrio-Siemens
• NDS Americas
• Neustar
• Nielson Media Research
• Optical Solutions
• Pioneer USA
• Qwest—DRM co-chair
• Real Communications, Inc.
• Sarnoff Corporation
• SBC
• Scientific Atlanta
• Siemens
• SkyStream
• Sony Electronics Inc.
• Sun Microsystems
• Symmetricom—QoSM co-chair
• Tandberg Television
• TDS Telecom
• Telchemy
• Telcordia
• Thomson Inc.
• Thales Broadcast & Multimedia, Inc.
• UTStarcom
• Westell
• Widevine Technologies—DRM co-chair
• Verizon—Technical Advisor
• Vidiom

Also attending: the FCC.

— End