ip coverstory_cover story 07/03/2014 08:34 Page 3
“While consumer tastes, desires and uses
may vary, the need for uninterrupted
connectivity does not. This can be
OPENNESS. As to whether ‘telco’ standards
are relevant in a content-rich environment or
whether NGNs are capable of handling
divergent demands,
Comigo’s Segal says that
telco standards such as
DVB, GSM, and SS7 are
mainly used today as
infrastructure standards.
“They are becoming less
and less relevant in a
content-rich environment,
where the industry is
moving towards open
standards. There are many
successful open Internet
and mobile standards
today, including HTML, HTTP, OAuth, and
even Android. In fact, their openness has been
among the biggest factors driving their
success.”
Broadpeak’s Nouvel notes that there have
been several attempts to standardise
behaviours and protocols in the telco world
with IPTV – such as DVB-IP - but the
implementations were one step ahead and the
industry was
not waiting for
additional
directives to
develop the
services.
“Furthermore,
IPTV could
work in a closed
ecosystem.
Maybe the
standards in
this case have
come too late.
The recent
absorption by
HbbTV of the
OIPF
organisation is
also showing
that in the OTT
world,
rationalisation is
at work. But still,
the
multiplication of
offers from different content providers that
are each pushing their own way of doing
things, leads to a fragmented offer,” she
warns.
According to Kaltura’s Dale, there may be
some value in having telco standards that
facilitate the delivery of live broadcasts
during the transition to NGNs, but it is
unlikely they will play a major role, because
broadcast content today comes from so many
different sources. “Content owners can
maximise the value of their content by getting
“With such an array
of broadband
technologies it is
important to ensure
harmonious
operations.”
Robin Mersh,
Broadband Forum
accomplished with proprietary technology, but
this approach does not provide guarantees of
interoperability or continued improvements of
the specification. Plus, there is no shared
feedback from the industry at large. By
definition, technology standard bodies are
open forums of collaboration. Proprietary
technology, by definition, is not,” he asserts,
pointing out that technology standards bodies
such as DLNA, MoCA, Wi-Fi and HomePlug
exist to sort out and establish best practices
for delivery IP-based content in the connected
home. “There are no silver bullets. We all
must work in concert. No standard is an
island.”
TRANSPARENT. Bram Tullemans, senior
project manager, broadband networks and
software platforms at the EBU, states that
without standards there would be no
interoperability, but standards alone are not
enough. “The market also has to be
transparent and allow easy switching between
suppliers something that in some (national)
situations can still be a problem. QoS and QoE
are not as directly related to standards as
interoperability is. QoS prerequisites bilateral
agreements from end to end,” he says, adding
that when you depend on others, standards
become essential, especially in a distributed
environment.
David Leporini, EVP of marketing,
products and security at Viaccess-Orca, notes
that QoS/QoE can be achieved, as shown by
existing proprietary ecosystems such as Apple,
by methods other than standardisation such
as vertical integration or de facto standards.
“One of the primary goals of standards is
certainly to enable interoperability. By
defining technical specifications such as
protocols and interfaces that all players can
follow and implement, it seems logical that
connecting various building blocks should just
work. However, standards developed by
industrial standardisation bodies usually rely
on proprietary technologies, are not
necessarily free of charge, and are generally
adopted on a voluntary basis.”
16 IP television
closer to consumers, provided that they don’t
get caught up in exclusive SLAs with their
delivery partners. If this remains a viable
path, it will be increasingly difficult to build
interoperability around a traditional service
provider’s delivery paths, outside of what we
are already seeing with edge peering
agreements between CDNs and ISPs,” he
warns.
RGB’s Fisher suggests the recent focus on
HTTP-based video protocols has led to a
significant improvement of QoE/QoS for
customers (gone are the days of ‘click here if
you have a modem connection or click here if
you have broadband’) and that, moreover,
next generation networks are designed to
handle TCP well. EBU’s Tullemans suggests
this is more of a capacity issue if NGNs are
capable of handling divergent demands, with
the relevance of telco standards diminishing
in the converging IP arena.
FORMATS. As to whether differing
streaming formats cause problems and the
likelihood of one ‘flavour’ become dominant,
Segal suggests that differing formats
introduce multiple problems. “One is device
“Today, video is treated
just like any other IP
data packet.”
Dave Robinson,
Alcatel-Lucent
interoperability. Each client device supports a
different set of streaming formats, so the
operator needs to adapt its content to each
one. This need to adapt leads to another
issue: server load. The operator needs to
encode the same content with different
streaming formats for different types of
devices, which causes an unnecessary load on
the encoding, packaging, and CDN
equipment. Finally, there is the issue of DRM
interoperability. Not all of today’s streaming
formats work well with DRM protection