Internet Media Guides

The increasing deployment of digital media distribution (DVB, Internet media streaming, networked home multimedia architectures) has led to a split into different application areas, each of which relying on dedicated networks, transport and control protocols, (different codecs), and finally different approaches to describing media sessions and to distributing these descriptions to user devices. Clearly, the assumption of a single, unified, IP Multicast enabled architecture that the original SDP/SAP- and RTP-based approach to media broadcast is based on, is no longer valid. Instead, new approaches must be developed that can achieve an integration of service and content access across different networking environments.

The Internet Media Guide (IMG) framework, a current development and standardization effort in the IETF, is an important component to that respect and is intended to be used as an replacement for SDP/SAP for media broadcast applications. The IMG framework supports common description languages to express meta information about services (and contents), their identification, and the dissemination of such information in a standardized fashion. Peered with adequate description languages, Internet Media Guides (IMGs), are able to provide the necessary service description and discovery platform functions that are required for today's diverse media broadcast environment.

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