Challenges, opportunities ahead for ITU’s new IPTV standards

Running a Canadian test bed for the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) latest Internet protocol television (IPTV) standards--as the ITU has suggested--would benefit Canada’s IPTV providers, industry players say. But it’s not clear which company in Canada—if any—will step forward to run the tests. On July 26, the ITU announced that the international IPTV sector “sent out a strong message of support” for the organization’s new service standards. Industry had participated in tests to demonstrate interoperability between various IPTV devices during an ITU Interop event in late July. Just following the meeting, held at the ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the ITU issued a release saying that a test service is now being conducted in Singapore and that there is interest in setting up test beds in India and Canada to work with the new service standards. But it’s unclear which Canadian IPTV provider would participate in the tests. Toby Johnson, a spokesman for the ITU, said the Communications Research Centre (CRC)—the federal government’s primary research and development lab for advanced telecommunications—had expressed interest in the test bed. But Bernard Caron, vice-president of broadcast technologies research at the CRC, suggested in an interview that is not the case. The CRTC runs a test bed for IPTV quality of service, he said, but the ITU’s test bed has more to do with commercial testing of new service technologies and evaluating pricing and channel-line up strategies. Service providers would undertake that kind of commercial testing, Caron said. The Wire Report contacted IPTV providers MTS Inc., Bell Canada, Telus Corp. and SaskTel for comment, but none was available by press time. Reinhard Scholl, deputy to the director of the telecommunication standardization bureau at the ITU, said no Canadians attended the ITU’s Interop event in Geneva last month. He agreed that it would be up to IPTV providers to conduct the testing. “Before you deploy a service commercially, you have to make sure it will be to the satisfaction of consumers,” he said. “You set up a test environment, you select a few clients or customers, and you run the service. You collect feedback from the customers and see if everything works to their satisfaction. Once you have confidence in that, you launch it commercially.” Scholl said the ITU standards cover "service discovery," terminal aspects, metadata, interactive multimedia, error recovery and audience measurement. He added that it's not likely that Canadian service providers are employing ITU standards in their technology and that customers would benefit if the carriers adopted the union’s specifications. “The ultimate beneficiary will be the consumer,” Scholl said. “As soon as we have a standard, a global solution, it means you have more competition. You get better quality, and you get lower prices. The customer has a choice.” Kelly Duplisea, a Bell Aliant vice-president responsible for the company’s FibreOP TV service, said in an interview that, before running an ITU standards test bed, her company would have to evaluate what would be involved. Duplisea said Bell Aliant uses equipment from Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola Inc. in its IPTV system, and that the company’s IPTV equipment predates the ITU standards. “We would certainly be strong believers in and promoters of standards in the telecommunications business,” she said. “They ultimately reduce your costs and dependency on any given supplier.” Ric Brovedani, senior director for the Americas in Alcatel-Lucent’s multimedia integration division in Halifax, said standards enable equipment interoperability, but they can also introduce new technology headaches. “You have routers, you have encoders, middleware, congestion points, VOD servers, switches, access devices, residential gateways and set-top boxes—typically running over a network that’s carrying voice and data services as well,” Brovedani said. “It’s amazing how, if you tweak one thing in one spot, you end up with no video at the other end.” But Brovedani said Alcatel-Lucent is likely to implement the standards, eventually. “We’ve been at the bleeding edge of some of these implementations,” he said. Alcatel-Lucent partners with Microsoft Corp. to deliver the Microsoft Mediaroom software to IPTV carriers. Telus now uses the popular Mediaroom software, and Bell Aliant and SaskTel are also moving to the platform, which offers personal-video recording services in multiple rooms at the same time. Brovedani said the move toward Mediaroom could impact somes companies’ interest in implementing new ITU standards. “I do not see them considering a new set of standards that would require them to revamp, redesign or significantly upgrade their network (cost, time and service impact all being the issues here),” he wrote in a follow-up email. “In some ways, the Canadian telcos have already defined a set of standards (which incidentally also align with major U.S. carriers as well) ... I would say that the ITU would have to enable standards that optimize or support the direction of these key players in order to be relevant.” Brovedani noted that Mediaroom has the largest market share of all commercial IPTV software systems. “If the market and customer base wholeheartedly supports new ITU standards, most vendors would likely support it as well. Right now, Microsoft and other established IPTV deployments have in some ways set the table stakes for the baseline standards—at least in the Canadian telco IPTV market.” news@thewirereport.ca

Challenges, opportunities ahead for ITU’s new IPTV standards

Broadcast | August 9, 2010

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