New Open IPTV Forum Starting

Just when you thought there wasn’t enough “group love” in the world today, IPTV jumps on the bandwagon. A long list of industry leaders has agreed to join forces for the Open IPTV Forum. It will be a consortium to look at a way to define an interoperable end-to-end specification for delivery of IPTV services.

Among the heavy hitters involved in the defining of IPTV are AT&T, Inc, Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung Siemens, Sony, and Telecom Italia. Since the forum is open to participation across the communications and entertainment industries, it will be interesting to see which way the pendulum swings.

The ultimate goal – according to the forum – is to accelerate the full standardization of IPTV-related technologies. It hopes to put specifications in place that will ensure the interoperability between consumer equipment and services that are compliant with the Open IPTV Forum. This will be a good thing for consumers because it will allow then to access a choice of contents and services among multiple providers.

The forum also intends to work on addressing key technology elements, operation standards technologies, and necessary interfaces.

In the beginning, the Open IPTV Forum will consist of just the founding members. It is hoped that other companies can be included in the work sometime at a later date.