Internet Streaming Media Alliance

Last updated

The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) was a non-profit corporation founded in December 2000, by Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Kasenna, Philips, and Sun Microsystems. [1] Its stated mission was to accelerate the market adoption of open standards for streaming and progressive download of rich media over all types of Internet Protocols (IP). It was an alliance with representatives from various points of the streaming work-flow.

Cisco Systems American multinational technology company

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in San Jose, California, in the center of Silicon Valley. Cisco develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. Through its numerous acquired subsidiaries, such as OpenDNS, WebEx, Jabber and Jasper, Cisco specializes into specific tech markets, such as Internet of Things (IoT), domain security and energy management. Cisco is incorporated in California.

Kasenna was a video on demand company based in California that was spun off of Silicon Graphics in 2000. It was acquired by Espial in 2008.

Philips Dutch multinational electronics company

Koninklijke Philips N.V. is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Amsterdam, one of the largest electronics companies in the world, currently focused in the area of healthcare and lighting. It was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik, with their first products being light bulbs. It was once one of the largest electronic conglomerates in the world and currently employs around 74,000 people across 100 countries. The company gained its royal honorary title in 1998 and dropped the "Electronics" in its name in 2013.

Contents

At the time ISMA was created, standards already existed for audio and video codecs (e.g. MPEG) and for real time streaming transport over IP networks (e.g. RTP). ISMA worked on selecting profiles, describing payload formats, and resolving various options of these standards. ISMA specifications typically adopted existing specifications. However, when specifications did not exist, the ISMA could create them. ISMA also performed interoperability testing, allowing its members to ensure that their products conformed to ISMA standards and interoperate.

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is a network protocol for delivering audio and video over IP networks. RTP is used in communication and entertainment systems that involve streaming media, such as telephony, video teleconference applications including WebRTC, television services and web-based push-to-talk features.

Specifications

ISMA released several specifications for the transport of rich media over IP:

MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It is a discrete cosine transform compression standard, similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 Part 2 and H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2.

The ISMA Encryption and Authentication, Version 1.1 specification specifies encryption and message authentication services for MPEG-4 over RTP streams. It was defined by the Internet Streaming Media Alliance and published on September 15, 2006.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, and even the provider of the communication service – from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.

Related Research Articles

H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bit-rate compressed format for videoconferencing. It was standardized by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) in a project ending in 1995/1996. It is a member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, and terminating real-time sessions that include voice, video and messaging applications. SIP is used for signaling and controlling multimedia communication sessions in applications of Internet telephony for voice and video calls, in private IP telephone systems, in instant messaging over Internet Protocol (IP) networks as well as mobile phone calling over LTE (VoLTE).

In multimedia, Motion JPEG is a video compression format in which each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is compressed separately as a JPEG image. Originally developed for multimedia PC applications, M-JPEG is now used by video-capture devices such as digital cameras, IP cameras, and webcams, as well as by non-linear video editing systems. It is natively supported by the QuickTime Player, the PlayStation console, and web browsers such as Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate.

Digital storage media command and control (DSM-CC) is a toolkit for developing control channels associated with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 streams. It is defined in part 6 of the MPEG-2 standard and uses a client/server model connected via an underlying network.

MPEG transport stream is a standard digital container format for transmission and storage of audio, video, and Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) data. It is used in broadcast systems such as DVB, ATSC and IPTV.

A container or wrapper format is a metafile format whose specification describes how different elements of data and metadata coexist in a computer file.

Timed text refers to the presentation of text media in synchrony with other media, such as audio and video.

IP over DVB or IP over MPEG implies that Internet Protocol datagrams are transferred over the MPEG transport stream, and are distributed using some digital television system, for example DVB-H, DVB-T, DVB-S or DVB-C.

ATSC-M/H is a U.S. standard for mobile digital TV that allows TV broadcasts to be received by mobile devices.

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) specifies a general-purpose data format and network protocol for transmitting digital media streams on Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The details of media encoding, such as signal sampling rate, frame size and timing, are specified in an RTP payload format. The format parameters of the RTP payload are typically communicated between transmission endpoints with the Session Description Protocol (SDP), but other protocols, such as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) may be used.

MPEG-4 Part 20, or MPEG-4 Lightweight Application Scene Representation (LASeR) is a rich media standard dedicated to the mobile, embedded and consumer electronics industries specified by the MPEG standardization group. LASeR is based on SVG Tiny and adds methods for sending dynamic updates and a binary compression format.

ISO base media file format defines a general structure for time-based multimedia files such as video and audio. The identical text is published as ISO/IEC 15444-12.

Wowza Streaming Engine is a unified streaming media server software developed by Wowza Media Systems. The server is used for streaming of live and on-demand video, audio, and rich Internet applications over IP networks to desktop, laptop, and tablet computers, mobile devices, IPTV set-top boxes, internet-connected TV sets, game consoles, and other network-connected devices. The server is a Java application deployable on most operating systems.

IEC 62455 is an International Electrotechnical Commission terminal specification standard, prepared by the IEC 100 Technical Committee (TC), for a service purchase and protection system for digital broadcasts. Its full title is Internet protocol (IP) and transport stream (TS) based service access. This 18Crypt technology aimed to compete the Open Security Framework (OSF) has never been successful in the market where less than 10 000 deployed devices were using it. On the opposite, the OSF aimed as an open approach enabling wider competition has been widely deployed in millions of devices and re-used in many standards like in the USA or in China.

MPEG media transport (MMT), specified as ISO/IEC 23008-1, is a digital container standard developed by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) that supports High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video. MMT was designed to transfer data using the all-Internet Protocol (All-IP) network.

Timed Text Markup Language (TTML), previously referred to as Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP), is an XML-based W3C standard for timed text in online media and was designed to be used for the purpose of authoring, transcoding or exchanging timed text information presently in use primarily for subtitling and captioning functions. TTML2, the second major revision of the language, was finalized on November 8, 2018. It has been adopted widely in the television industry, including by Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), European Broadcasting Union (EBU), ATSC, DVB, HbbTV and MPEG CMAF and several profiles and extensions for the language exist nowadays.

SMPTE 2022 is a standard from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) that describes how to send digital video over an IP network. Video formats supported include MPEG-2 and serial digital interface The standard was introduced in 2007.

References

  1. "Internet Streaming Media Alliance formed". CNN. 2000-12-14. Archived from the original on August 9, 2012. Retrieved 2011-12-23.