Streaming of Governed Content - Time for a Standard

This paper presents ISO/IEC 23000-5 -media streaming player, an ISO standard targeting the distribution of governed content in streaming mode. This standard is a major integration of MPEG technologies, ranging from MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to MPEG-21 including a set of inter-device protocols developed by the Digital Media Project, now ISO/IEC 29116-1 -Media Streaming MAF Protocols. The paper also presents Chillout, adopted for the open source reference software of this standard. Chillout is written in Java and provides a set of libraries for developing applications conforming to the standard.

I. Introduction

The industry of governed video streaming has been mostly a niche market so far, but the pre-requisites for a massive take up of so-called IPTV solutions and services are all in place. From the one hand, the growing number of terabytes of user generated content on the web and the new generation of video services on the Internet is attracting the interest of many operators to design and deploy solutions for distributing content in a way that respect the content rights holders. From the other, the limitations in the current proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions felt by many operators and governments are pushing for the design and the development of new alternatives.