According to an ITU spokesman, the approval process is expected to not take more than eight months to complete. Dissension, however, will not be a primary driver of the delay. Unlike many standards processes where debates and conflicting viewpoints dominate the majority of the discussions, this process has been relatively consensus based thus far.

“This standards activity is in an early stage IPTV market unlike some other technologies that started to do standards when their technology is pretty mature” said Naxin Wang, system architect and senior manager of system software engineering for UTStarcom. “For this standard body, the competition is not that intense. People work together to say what is the best way to create this market for IPTV to take off, instead of saying ‘I’m Cisco, do it our way.’ It is more collaborative than other standards bodies.”

The main topic on the table amongst the middleware focus groups was the nature of the high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services. The three architectures that came out of the 2007 focus group included non-NGN based, NGN based – although these solutions are not yet in place – and NGN IMS based architectures.

Middleware focus group member Jurgen Heiles, manager of infotainment delivery standardization for Nokia Siemens Networks, agreed that the meeting was more about reaching an agreement on architecture, rather than overruling opinions.

“The ITU activity is basically consensus-based, so there’s no majority voting,” Heiles said. “It is important to basically satisfy all needs and also work it out so several solutions are defined….In the future, when the NGN networks become more widely deployed, IPTV can make use of a common infrastructure that is provided by NGN and does things like authentication, user database, common results and mission control for quality of service.”

Going forward, the next four meetings of the ITU global standards initiative will concentrate on the details and unresolved issues from last year’s focus group. The ITU will focus on preparing standards based on the findings of this year’s focus groups as well as required industry protocols. The study groups’ discussions will center on 21 documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service, security, digital rights management, unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks – with the ultimate goal of moving from proprietary platforms to interoperable ones.

“As the standards become more defined, I think they will pick up the best of the current deployments that are out there,” Harlan said. “Certainly, the more we can get standards in, the more the marketplace stabilizes. The quicker we move from people that are the early adopters, we can start moving to more mainstream adopters.”