Leveraging community standards for wide compatibility in digital item distribution

The ENTHRONE II project (and its predecessor) heavily use open standards such as MPEG-21, MPEG-7, TV-Anytime, and H.264 as a basis for a full application stack system for Quality of Service (QoS)-enabled delivery for Digital Items. However, in order to reap the gains QoS offers, the project has had to develop a largely closed ecosystem of servers and end-user terminals for monitoring QoS along the delivery path. This brief research note shows that by embracing user-land and non-ISO standards such as RSS, Atom, HTML, and Microformats, many more end-user terminals can be supported in the ENTHRONE ecosystem, albeit in a slightly degraded (no QoS monitoring, somewhat limited content adaptation) mode.