Trade Association Organizes ISMA International IPTV Summit to Promote Interoperability

By Laura Stotler

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

The Internet Streaming Media Alliance has organized the ISMA International IPTV Summit to enable European companies to work toward end-to-end interoperability and scalability issues for IPTV (News - Alert). The half-day symposium will be held September 12 in Amsterdam and is the second in a series of meetings to address the need for global open standards to further IPTV development.

 

ISMA is an independent trade association and has organized the upcoming event to offer an interactive forum for senior engineering and business development executives. MRG, Inc., a research group, will provide analysis of existing IPTV standards and a number of companies will also report on their standards-based deployments at the symposium. The event will be free, but reservations are required.

 

The ISMA organized the series of summits in response to a survey that indicated a need for market-driven, open standards to support deployment of scalable, best-of-breed systems. The association hosted a similar event in Chicago in June, and is planning a third meeting in Asia.

 

The flagship ISMA 2.0 standard offers end-to-end interoperable streaming and storage of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and MPEG-4 AAC. The ISMACryp 1.0 and 1.1 specifications cover end-to-end content protection. The ISMA also holds regular interoperability tests and has a structured product conformance program.

 

"We are still struggling through the infancy of the IPTV industry and both vendors and their customers are laboring under the costly and time-consuming inefficiencies associated with proprietary systems," said Yuval Fisher, ISMA secretary and chief scientist at Envivio, Inc. "For the industry to reach its potential, we need to come together with the conformity programs and interoperability that will ensure faster product development, expand market opportunities, reduce risk and allow best-of-breed product integration," he said.