the connected world supplement special report Supplement sponsored by
The last 12 months have been another period of intense activity and progress for the Open IPTV Forum - OIPF - with some developments consolidating and reinforcing the role and status of the Forum, and others ensuring alignment with the evolution of the IPTV industry. On the latter point it’s interesting to note that the domain of IPTV, the landscape in which the OIPF operates, is a dynamic environment which continuously evolves and reinvents itself. To remain relevant, the OIPF and its work must track these trends and ensure that the published specifications keep pace with the changing expectation of the IPTV market.
itself undergoing a significant change of focus. The organisation’s published specifications for standardised end-to- end IPTV are living documents, which will continue to evolve with the market. However, the OIPF is switching its primary focus away from the introspective and intensely detailed technical work of developing the specifications, and towards efforts to ensure that they are adopted and used as widely as possible in the market. As described in a moment, the publication of Release 2 confirms the specifications as an increasingly comprehensive point of reference for IPTV best practice. The challenge now
OIPF: driving change T
he major practical developments and achievements of the OIPF over the past year are outlined below, but as an organisation the Forum is
is to ensure they achieve the originally stated objective of stimulating a mass market for IPTV.
Left to right:
Mohammed Dadas, vice president of OIPF; Darren Vogel, marketing director and marketing committee
chairman, OIPF; Nilo Mitra,
president of OIPF; and Luca Pesando, vice-president of OIPF.
Focus of the forum
The increasing OIPF emphasis on ‘go to market’ activities will see the external profile of the Forum actively growing, with increased visibility in the public IPTV community and announcement of further measures to stimulate and encourage adoption and usage. Central among these will be the certification programme, based on existing test specifications developed for products that implement the IPTV solution specifications. Currently under development, the certification programme is essential for checking the compliance of products that implement the specifications. In May 2011 the OIPF announced the next phase in establishing certification activities, and issued an RFP for test tools to solicit responses from industry participants who may have an interest in providing them. The certification programme itself will involve the use
S20 l ibe l the connected world supplement september/october 2011 l
www.ibeweb.com
of test centres, which will provide a formal test execution environment for vendors with products which they wish to certify.
Release 2 and 2.1
During the past year the Forum has published Release 2 of its specifications, which adds to the significant body of work contained in Release 1. Release 2 evolves and extends the functional scope of the specifications in many areas, with notable enhancements shown in the panel 1. Given the earlier comments regarding
the need for continued alignment of the specifications with the evolution of IPTV and other IP-based video as described earlier, the following features are of particular interest in demonstrating this requirement: So-called OTT (Over-the-Top) services
will be an increasingly common feature of IPTV services, and are typically based on HTTP adaptive streaming rather than the constant bitrate UDP format favoured for traditional managed IPTV solutions. The inclusion of adaptive streaming of live and on-demand content, derived from 3GPP's adaptive HTTP streaming specification, anticipates this trend and ensures that the specifications remain relevant in this area. Today, there is significant interest in
technologies and techniques which help meet consumer expectations regarding channel change times, particularly when compared with traditional digital
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