Written by: Mats Cedervall, Uwe Horn, Yunchao Hu, Ignacio Más Ivars and Thomas Näsström

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To exploit new business opportunities in the area of IPTV, the service must evolve from "TV over IP" into an interactive, personalized application that runs on several devices and can easily be integrated with other services.

This article gives an overview of the Open IPTV Forum, whose aim is to work out a future-proof standard for evolving IPTV services. The authors summarize the main features and requirements addressed by the Open IPTV Forum and present Ericsson's take on how some of the challenges raised by the forum ought to be resolved.


Introduction
Fixed and mobile broadband access networks enable new, internet-based media services for consumption on PCs, portable devices, and mobile phones. Two examples of video-centric services are YouTube and Joost. Moving ahead, home networks will also have an increasingly important role.

Indeed, Strategy Analytics states that the most significant home technology trend of the next five years will be the ability of fixed and portable devices to exchange media with each other over a multimedia home network.

By way of example, Sony's LocationFree concept addresses this trend by making content from different sources (for instance, live TV channels, DVD and DVR) available on all kinds of devices, including large-screen TVs, PCs/laptops, and portable players. Forums such as the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) are working on guidelines and specifications to guarantee interoperability between consumer devices from vendors in networked home environments.

Advances made in access and home network technologies have already led to a significant shift in the way many young people consume media. Studies show that this category of users prefers online media to traditional, linear media such as TV, radio, CD/DVD, and newspapers. A study conducted by Ofcom in the UK, for example, found that on average the time that youth aged 16-24 watch TV each week has declined by seven hours.

These are clear indications that traditional TV services must compete with other media services that are perhaps more relevant in terms of delivery and content to the lifestyle of young consumers. The advertising industry has already recognized this phenomenon and is spending increasingly more money on online ads and less on traditional media, including newspapers and TV.

IPTV is being billed as an enabler of new business models in the media service landscape. However, it has to provide more than just TV over IP; indeed, to succeed, IPTV must evolve into an interactive, personalized application framework for creating multi-media-centric applications that can be used and controlled from several devices and easily integrated with other services. To achieve this goal, future-proof IPTV solutions are needed that support

• media transport over managed networks and the public internet;
• fixed-mobile convergence;
• integration with communication services; and
• integration with home networks and associated devices.