Stockholm, Sweden - A group of companies involved in delivering television services over the Internet (IPTV), including AT&T, Ericsson, Sony, Philips and Samsung Siemens, on Monday announced the formation of a consortium that will develop an end-to-end specification for the technology.

The Open IPTV Forum "will focus on development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies, and help to maximize the benefits of IPTV for consumers, network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and infrastructure providers."

The group will address issues including content protection and interoperability with retail consumer devices in specifications expected to be released later in 2007.

Other founding members of the group include France Telecom, Panasonic and Telecom Italia; notably absent from the group are large IPTV industry firms Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent.

Related Links:
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=227995

http://uk.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUKL1946648620070319

http://www.openiptvforum.org