Most people working in the identity field are generally resigned to living an invisible existence. Unlike when I was working for the New England Patriots (where I couldn’t walk ten feet without bumping into coverage of our every breath), toiling away on standards and specifications often receives little to no recognition. That’s why it was great to see the Liberty Alliance work getting props from Peter Stern, the executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Time Warner Cable.
In an article in Multichannel News, Stern talked about how its “TV Everywhere” initiative is ensuring their Internet video services can scale. Deep inside their strategy for the widest possible deployment is their embracing of Liberty Alliance identity management specifications:
Stern said Time Warner Cable has “embraced” the Liberty Alliance standards for creating and establishing users IDs. “We think we can create a scalable solution, without needing a common database across the MSOs,” he said. “The plan is to do this bilaterally, using open standards.”
While it’s not immediately clear which specific standards they’re adopting (it could be a mix of ID-WSF, ID-FF with SAML2.0), it’s clear they’ve evaluated them against their goals as quoted from the article:
- “We’re looking to create a model that’s friendly to cable, works for consumers… so if you’re paying for it in your living room, you can also watch it online,” Schwartz said.
- Stern emphasized that the authentication process for TV Everywhere must be very easy for customers and programmers. The user ID and password capabilities for TV Everywhere must be integrated so users can log in once, and access multiple programmers’ services.
- The system must also “deliver authorizations quickly — consumers don’t want to have to wait for several seconds, let alone minutes, to watch the content so we need to be sure we can build scalable system… across millions of requests happening on a regular basis,” Stern said.
It’s not the popular press (meaning the average user won’t know, or care, about this), but it’s great to see the word spreading about LAP’s identity management tools. Of specific interest to me is that Time Warner Cable is obviously paying close attention to the need to deploy highly scalable and interoperable systems that service end users without locking them into a proprietary solution.
April 2nd, 2009 | 
