The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions today announced that it has created the IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) to develop standards and related technical and operations activities surrounding telco video service.

The forum formalizes a process that got a kick-start earlier this year when ATIS formed the IPTV Exploratory Group. Kevin Schneider, CTO of Adtran and Bill DeMuth, vice president and CTO of Surewest, co-chaired that group. Additionally, the IIF will build on the work of ATIS' Next-Generation Network Framework document that was produced late last year.

"We're doing a gap analysis on that and as a result, the NGN initiative also will continue to look at IPTV," said Tim Jeffries, vice president of technology development for ATIS. Among the biggest issues the group will tackle is the establishment of open networks within the IPTV environment and quality of service. Both issues have become hot buttons recently with vendors. While many in the telco video world believe that building open networks is the only way to keep control of costs--and the NGN Framework specifies a largely open network--there are other factors at work.

"Open is a relative term," Jeffries said. "The content providers are very keen to have content protection in place so it's important to have IPTV in line with what the NGN says."

Additionally, the IIF will coordinate standards activities for IPTV technologies, including acting as a liaison with outside groups; developing interoperability agreements, technical reports and ATIS standards; and providing the venue for interoperability activities and the assessment of IPTV issues in the context of NGN.