Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Establishes IPTV Special Committee

Enhanced Approach to IPTV Global Standardization Activities; Establishment of IPTV Special Committee in the Telecommunications Council

In January 2008, ITU-T established a new framework of IPTV-GSI,* which aggregates relevant work groups simultaneously in order to speed up the recommendation work for IPTV global standardization.

In response to this, MIC decided to establish a new IPTV special committee to enhance the Telecommunications Council review structure for IPTV global standardization.

*IPTV-GSI (IPTV Global Standard Initiative): A structure that holds a variety of meetings for handling IPTV research issues at the same place simultaneously, and that focuses on review toward IPTV-related recommendation. It plays the same role as SG.

1. Background

Quality-assured IPTV, one of the major services to be implemented on next-generation networks (NGN), has been actively developed both at home and abroad.

Under such a situation, ITU-T focused on IPTV as an important standardization issue and established FG IPTV in which people can participate widely, including forums other than ITU, and has conducted discussions since July 2006. As a result, a draft recommendation was compiled last December.

ITU-T has established IPTV-GSI, which aggregates relevant study work groups simultaneously and has started to work toward early recommendation in order to conduct speedy discussions over multiple study groups (SG), because IPTV is a service to be implemented through extensive collaboration with technological fields such as transmission, platforms and terminals.

In Japan, MIC decided, at the ITU-T Sub-Council on March 5, 2008, to establish an IPTV Special Committee in the Telecommunication Council in order to enhance the domestic review structure focusing on a future global IPTV market in response to the IPTV-GSI recommendation work, as well as to efficiently and intensively conduct domestic discussions about IPTV global standardization.

2. Considerations

Items on IPTV-GSI study issues:
(1) Architecture (basic design) and requirements
(2) Quality of Service (QoS) and performance
(3) Service security and content protection
(4) IPTV network control
(5) End system (receiver) and interoperability (openness)
(6) Middleware, application, content platform