ISMA Releases Next Link in Content Delivery Chain

ISMA 2.0 is designed to lay the groundwork for streaming devices both large and small, although Mavrogeanes sees streaming to mobile devices as one of the areas of greatest need. "In general, there’s this myth in the industry about the excitement people have about being able to deliver video communications to a wireless device," he says. "But the reality is that there is not a high degree of interoperability between the various service providers. Everyone’s implementing different methodologies." These varying methodologies can lead to incompatibilities between competing systems.

"ISMA has a certification program where you can get the ISMA logo and put it on your product. The consumer is then assured that they have multivendor interoperability," says Mavrogeanes. "Three, four, five years ago you could easily buy some kind of video widget and it just wouldn’t work with another box. Thanks to ISMA, we’re seeing that become much less of an issue. What we seek to do is get consumers to demand the ISMA standard."

Eventually, the plan is for consumers to be able to recognize ISMA’s logo as a symbol that signifies a particular product’s accordance with the organization’s implementation guidelines, therefore guaranteeing interoperability. So far, though, ISMA’s logo has not been especially visible. "We depend on PR and the press to talk about it and how important it is," he says. "We haven’t promoted it as much as we need to." Plus, the market for consumer streaming devices is still immature, so many consumers don’t even know that there’s a problem, as they have yet to acquire streaming software or hardware of their own.

Looking Ahead
Moving ahead, ISMA will continue to pursue its ultimate goal of defining and standardizing the entire content delivery chain. Another important link that was released earlier this year is ISMA Authentication and Encryption specification (colloquially known as Crypt). This specification lays the groundwork for the future of DRM, defining the encryption scheme but not how to handle keys management. "It’s pointless to deal with keys management if you don’t have something to plug the key into. You first have to define a fundamental encryption and delivery scheme and make it useful," says Mavrogeanes.

ISMA utilizes a building-block approach to its specification rollouts. "All of our standards build on top of each other," he says. "It’s a nice, safe, incremental rollout." But even though ISMA has yet to define large chunks of the content delivery chain, that doesn’t mean that you have to wait around for them to finish what they started. "You can implement a full ISMA-based solution using the currently available ISMA standards and using third-party solutions for any component for which ISMA doesn’t have a standard," says Mavrogeanes. "If you do that, you can be sure that when ISMA implements a new standard it won’t require a forklift upgrade."

Mavrogeanes promises the release of additional links in the chain sometime soon in 2005, including elements like metadata and closed captioning. Looking a little further down the road, ISMA plans on "taking Crypt to the next level to create a more comprehensive DRM solution," says Mavrogeanes.

If you’d like to be involved with the process, the best way is to sign up to become an ISMA member. "ISMA is not a single vendor-led entity; members decide what we’re going to do," says Mavrogeanes. "Any member can come forward with a tech proposal. If other members agree, then it becomes a work item and it goes into a standards document. We’re not an MPEG organization; we’re not an IP organization. If members want to find a standard over how to deliver video over barbed wire, great, we’ll see what we can do."

If you’d like to learn more about the organization and meet some of its members, consider attending ISMA’s all-day session at NAB in Las Vegas on April 17.