Creating a rich media standard

The Holy Grail of streaming media is to deliver audio, video and interactivity to virtually any IP-connected device. A bevy of proprietary formats and a lack of standards muddies that goal, slowing the growth of streaming media applications.

Last week, the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) released version 1.0 of the ISMA specification, a set of open standards designed to get past the incompatible players and formats that plague the industry. ISMA 1.0 provides guidelines for which format and protocols to use when building products to ensure interoperability between different vendor offerings.

IMSA 1.0 calls for companies to use the new MPEG4 audio/video compression standard and the Real-Time Protocol and Real-Time Streaming Protocol for delivering media. It also calls for the use of Session Description Protocol for announcing which streaming media programs are available for playing.

"You can have a server from Sun talking to a player from Apple and the content itself was encoded by a Philips machine," ISMA board member Tim Schaaff says. "[ISMA 1.0] is more a collection of hints and suggestions to create interoperable products."

Today, Microsoft Windows Media players can only talk to Microsoft servers, while RealPlayer receives its information from a RealServer. Under ISMA 1.0, any MPEG4 server can talk with any MPEG4-compatible player. However, it will still be a few months before we see products that conform to ISMA 1.0.

Sigma Designs, a set-top box chip maker and ISMA board member in Milpitas, Calif., is currently designing a chip set that conforms to the specification. The new specification lets the company focus on creating set-top box technology that will work with most other vendors' products.

"Streaming is like other communications - you need to have an end-to-end solution," says Ken Lowe, vice president of business development at Sigma Designs. "A standard allows you to just focus on your core competencies and not have to extend yourself to the other end of the line."

Lowe says his company will be sampling ISMA-compatible chipsets by the end of this month and that there should be a number of MPEG4 and ISMA product demonstrations at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. But it will be a few more months before products are widely available.

Other companies involved in ISMA include Apple, Cisco, IBM, Kasenna, Phillips, Lucent, Analog Devices and Inktomi. The ISMA 1.0 specification is available to anyone for $150. It can be downloaded from the ISMA Web site www.isma.tv

Contact Multimedia Editor Jason Meserve

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