ATIS IPTV Metadata Standards Enable Transport of Critical Information

ATIS Releases Specifications for Emergency Alerts and Electronic Program Guide

WASHINGTON — ATIS today announced that the ATIS Interoperability IPTV Forum (IIF) released two metadata specifications to add to its suite of leading global IPTV requirements. The two new standards, the IPTV Electronic Program Guide (EPG) Metadata Specification (ATIS-0800020) and the IPTV Emergency Alert System (EAS) Metadata Specification (ATIS-0800012) both enable the transport of critical information to customers.

The IPTV Electronic Program Guide (EPG) Metadata Specification offers IPTV users the ability to access information about a practically limitless amount of programming transported over an IP-network. A scalable solution, the EPG standard partitions large amounts of information into manageable quantities. The convenient, unified view permits a consumer to identify and retrieve random yet highly detailed content-related information and makes possible navigation, selection, and acquisition of content from a variety of different content, service and network providers.

“The vast number of IPTV channels can be overwhelming to a user, but the IPTV EPG standard realizes the business-driven need to deliver IPTV service to the consumer in a practical manner,” stated Susan Miller, President and CEO of ATIS. “The EPG standard is a critical component of the end-to-end IPTV standards solutions created in the IIF.

A second recently released standard, the IPTV EAS Metadata Specification, with the earlier released Emergency Alert Service Provisioning Specification (ATIS-0800012), will support compliance with federal mandates for radio and television broadcast and digital cable. In adapting the EAS to IPTV service, the ATIS IIF supports the government’s direction to move to the XML-based Common-Alerting-Protocol (CAP). The XML-based solution put forth in the IPTV EAS Metadata standard implements the concepts that have traditionally been envisioned for handling Emergency Alerts in video service and provides the service provider with improved control over how the alert is presented to the user.

“With the publication of the IPTV EAS standard, ATIS IIF makes expanding the traditional level of services possible to realize features that have been visualized but not yet implemented in incumbent services,” added Ms. Miller.

IPTV Emergency Alert System (EAS) Metadata Specification (ATIS-0800012) and IPTV Electronic Program Guide (EPG) Metadata Specification (ATIS-0800020) are available through the ATIS Document Center.