OKI announces audience rating system

Japanese vendor OKI Electric Industry has announced an IPTV audience rating system--not one that rates IPTV audiences, but that allows those audiences to rate what they are watching, including the quality of the viewing experience. The new platform is first being targeted at Japan's IPTV market.

Called the OKI Audience Rating Information System, the product collects--with authorization from customers--data such as user preferences and viewer history in an encrypted audience rating library on an IPTV customer's TV gear. The information is then sent securely to a server located at the carrier's IPTV distribution center. The data can then be printed out as viewership reports which service providers can offer to programme producers.

Masa Saito, general manager of IP Systems Division at OKI, said in a statement that the company has proposed technology to handle audience rating information to ASTAP, Asia's communication standard organisation and to the International Telecommunications Union's IPTV Focus Group. "We will continue our activities within IPTV-GSI," the ITU's IPTV standardization initiative, he said.

The ITU's IPTV-GSI just held a standards meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, last week, and earlier this month, on of the ITU's study group's recommended quality of experience and performance monitoring parameters.

For more:
- see this report [1] at IPTV News

Related articles:
The DSL Forum has been working on quality of experience standards DSL Forum report [2]
The ITU also has been working on home networking standards ITU report [3]