The CRID may yet have its day In 2001/2002 I was involved in standardising "next
generation" on-demand digital television and interactive media content
with the TV-Anytime Forum. Very
similar technology powers the UK's
Sky+ box, and parts of it have been chosen by various broadcasters around the
world. The forum had a lofty public goal, to create an open horizontal market,
for content producers, service providers and consumers. In reality, the outcome
was somewhat less ambitious, but the final analysis is still years away. One
thing we did achieve, after traveling the globe to attend some thirty five
meetings, was to have an Internet RFC for the TV-Anytime CRID. The CRID is a
Content Reference ID, a means of referring to an item of content independent of
its location in time and space. In addition we standardised a mechanism for
resolving the CRID to a locator, a concrete locatable instance of that content. As well as having a RFC that describes the CRID syntax, the CRID is to
become an IETF-registered URL prefix, so that a device can know that any URL
that begins "crid://" is a TV-Anytime CRID. The TV-Anytime system is
an ETSI standard. Yet the world envisaged by
the forum is happening: digital music, downloadable movies, forward looking
television broadcasters like Channel
4 launching their VOD service (powered by Cape Clear), the Internet of course -
still, and hopefully always, an open horizontal (market-) place. It will be interesting to watch this continue to evolve. The CRID may yet have its day.
8:42:16 AM 
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