ITU

Due to the large volume of news generated by the recent 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and other factors, we are covering stories in this issue in round-up/summary format. We anticipate that it will take us several more days to process all the news from the show: so if your company has sent us a press release or briefed us on an announcement, and you don't yet see your news covered in this issue, please bear with us.

Because the [itvt] editorial team is on the road this week, we are covering stories in this edition of the newsletter in round-up format:

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is set to hold its first IPTV interop event later this month at its headquarters in Geneva. Testing is scheduled to take place on July 20th and 21st, and vendors will be able to showcase interoperability to potential customers--i.e. broadcasters and content and service providers--on July 22nd and 23rd. According to the global standards body, the interoperability testing will revolve around its ITU-T IPTV standards, including H.701 (error recovery), H.721 (IPTV terminal), H.740 (audience measurement), H.750 (metadata), H.761 (ginga-NCL), H.762 (lightweight interactive multimedia), and H.770 (service discovery).

UK-based set-top box company, Pace, on Wednesday launched a new set-top platform that uses Microsoft's Mediaroom IPTV software. According to the company, its engineering team developed the customizable platform in order to enable operators to quickly and easily roll out IPTV, hybrid broadcast/broadband and OTT services.

Because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco) and on our new, post-TVOT EBIF Intensive event (March 5th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

Standards body, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), said Tuesday that it has given first stage approval (consent) to a new standard that enables an IPTV end-user to locate and subscribe to content coming from different, independent service providers. According to the organization, the standard--Recommendation ITU-T H.770-"Mechanisms for service discovery and selection for IPTV"--describes the mechanisms for service provider discovery, service discovery and selection. Services such as linear TV and video-on-demand are addressed, with metadata that describes programming and delivery protocols detailed, the ITU says.