GMI 2008 highlights IMS-IPTV challenges

After spending most of two weeks away from the public conducting interoperability tests, participants in the MultiService's Forum's Global MultiService Interoperability 2008 test event (GMI 2008) emerged from their labs (including a Verizon lab in Waltham, Mass.) yesterday to discuss their progress. The test event will finish up within the next couple days.

The participants have been busily performing "more than 1,000 different tests over five service providers' network links among three continents using about 225 network devices and end-user gadgets provided by 22 vendors," according to ComputerWorld. What the tests have in common is the IP Multimeda Subsystems architecture, but this year, the real focus of the GMI event has been how to incorporate and support IPTV standards, technology and applications into IMS.

Participants noted that one IPTV-related challenge the tests highlight was the difficulty of creating an interface between the IPTV set-top box and the IMS infrastructure. That seems like a pretty basic and necessary issue that must be solved. The benefit of IMS to support IPTV is that it will help create truly open architectures and promote the ability of TV and video applications running over carrier networks to be delivered to a wider variety of devices. So far, working in their own IPTV worlds and just focusing on getting their services up and running, IPTV service providers have not viewed such capabilities as a priority.

For more:
- ComputerWorld reports [1] from Waltham

Related articles
GMI 2008 was convened to take a closer look at IPTV [2]
ATIS standards were at the heart of some of the tests [3]