Sapporo City, Hokkaido, Japan, 6 February 2012

Message

Good morning from here at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

It is a great pleasure for us to be part of this important experiment showcasing ITU-T’s H.762 “LIME” Recommendation for IPTV services.

There are already tens of millions of IPTV subscribers globally. This is a technology offering consumers interactivity and a choice of services unimagined a few years ago, and is changing the face of television broadcasting throughout the world.

ITU’s international standards ensure that anyone anywhere can develop products and services to our standards and enter a global market. This increases competition, opens up opportunities for startup companies, and reduces costs to consumers.

IPTV will create a whole new market for innovation, and trials such as this mark the beginning of an exciting period of growth in the breadth and size of the IPTV market.

I would like to congratulate all those that have developed ITU’s very successful suite of IPTV standards and have been participating in our conformity and interoperability programme.

Our interoperability events ensure that products produced by different manufacturers interoperate, will not cause any compatibility problems for consumers, or create any market confusion. You can find out more about ITU and its IPTV standardization work on our website.

The ITU Secretariat is pleased to contribute to this experiment linking a number of our member countries via state-of-the-art IPv6 research networks.

I would like to thank the organizers for this initiative and wish you all every success.