The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Standards today released a high-level architectural standard for IPTV that has been developed by its IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF).

The IPTV High Level Architecture Standard (ATIS-0800007) is a reference architecture for further IIF work and is designed to enable an end-to-end IPTV system to be deployed using hardware or software from multiple vendors.

“The High Level Architecture marks a major step in introducing IPTV into homes globally,” said Daniel O’Callaghan, IIF Chairman and principal pember of Technical Staff, Verizon, in a prepared statement. “It was a cooperative effort among many of the communications industry’s leading service providers and vendors who worked closely together with the common goal of helping IPTV reach its market potential.”

Service providers deploying IPTV, including AT&T and Verizon, are increasingly concerned about standards, said Danny Briere, CEO of the TeleChoice consultancy.

“They have been working on this for quite a while, it is a major initiative,” he said. “Everyone realizes that no one company is going to be able to do all of this themselves. It’s important that you be able to open up your platform and take in other applications or services.”

For example, he said, IPTV providers would like to be able to offer storm warnings via TV alerts, but this isn’t an application they are likely to be able to develop on their own. An Emergency Alert System is one of the specifications that the IIF is working on next.

The High Level Architecture spells out components that will interface with each other to deliver IPTV, and the interfaces between the service-providers and network providers, as well as both Web-based and IP Multi-media Subsystem (IMS)-based approaches to adding functionality. The next step for the IIF is to look at other specifications, ATIS said, such as a linear/broadcast TV service; consumer-domain initialization and attachment that brings consumer devices into the IPTV realm; media protocols for actual audio and video media delivery over a private IP network and remote management of devices in the consumer domain.