The best things in life are free. So sang John Lennon in 1963. But this is business. And in business, the song title, rather than its opening line, is more appropriate: “Money (That's what I want).”

In this business of next-generation communications, content-based services are rendered with the expectation of a profitable return; otherwise, what's the point? But unless and until the myriad of players involved in rendering these services agree on how to mediate, rate, charge and compensate for them, someone is not going to get what they want.

Standards are invented to resolve thorny issues such as this. And the goal of one standards organization, IPDR.org, is to make everyone in the IPTV world render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, whether that be Caesar the service provider, Caesar the content provider or Caesar the aggregator.

The Internet Protocol Detail Record Organization is a collaborative industry consortium focused on IP service usage and exchange standards. At TeleStrategies' Billing & OSS World in Miami earlier this month, the organization unveiled its industrywide work plan on accounting and settlement standards for IPTV services.

The briefing included a major portion of the IPDR.org work plan outlining the accounting and settlement efforts to date and into the future. It also provided information about initial use cases and functionality.

It highlighted the work done so far on additional elements and protocol enhancements related to IPTV services and the development of key requirements related to content settlement and revenue sharing. Major members within the organization, such as Amdocs, BSG and others provided demonstrations of the IPTV specifications.

“The time frame is to have a service spec that is proofed internally and that we can give to other industry organizations by September,” said Kelly Anderson, president and chief operating officer of IPDR.org. “We will work with other industry bodies the rest of the year and hope to have the spec fully released to members by the end of the year.”

Those other bodies include ATIS, CableLabs, 3GPP, ITU-T and the TeleManagement Forum (TMF.) IPDR.org sponsored a TMF Catalyst project last week called Managing IP Services with NGOSS, which was demonstrated at TeleManagement World in Nice, France.

Led by Cisco Systems and joined by Broadhop, Cisco, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Digital Fairway, Fujitsu, Intec Telecom Systems, Pantero and Tech Mahindra, the project implemented applications from multiple vendors that were integrated through standards-based interfaces in order to roll out new service deployments, monitor the health of the network and its components, and support and monitor the service level compliance of the network while performing rating and billing functions leveraging IPDR.org specifications.

“When you can interoperate with different industry leaders and the products they are offering today and work on compliance this way, it makes the work real,” Anderson said. She added that as part of the Catalyst Project, the TMF has expressed interest in layering the IPDR.org work into its shared information data model.

“By us working in our exclusive pieces [of architecture] and submitting them into other organizations, I think you will see widespread adoption of our standard,” Anderson said.

Jim Warner, vice chair of industry communications for the TMF, said it is work such as this that helps consortiums stay out in front of the needs of its members. “We believe that's where the industry is headed, our jobs are to be out in front before things dawn on everyone else,” he said.

To date, there isn't much defined in the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture around accounting and settlement, Anderson said, although you can see the big cloud where a standard solutions is supposed to be.

Anderson said a lack of standards would impede the implementation of IPTV services. Worse yet, it might not.

“This is not a long-term project. It's more ‘spec a little, build a little’ so we can get something useful out to the industry before the opportunity is gone and everybody is using proprietary interfaces,” Anderson said.

Still, she hopes the standard will be adopted into the IMS architecture. “We are working with ATIS on IMS harmonization right now,” Anderson said. “They do have an accounting architecture, but it remains to be seen whether or not it will be suitable for multimedia IPTV-based services.”