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The Internet Streaming Media Alliance has released a spec for DRM that is vendor-neutral and involves no royalties.

Not truly open source, but perhaps better than Windows of Real DRM,

If you check out ISMI's members page then you'll see it lists Apple as one of six 'sponsor members'. Futhermore if you look at the board of directors page then you'll see that each of these companies has one board member.

So presumably Apple controls 1/6 of ISMI - so they'd need to get at least 2 of the other companies on their side to oppose DRM in MPEG4 sucessfully.

If you check out ISMI's members page then you'll see it lists Apple as one of six 'sponsor members'. Futhermore if you look at the board of directors page then you'll see that each of these companies has one board member.

So presumably Apple controls 1/6 of ISMI - so they'd need to get at least 2 of the other companies on their side to oppose DRM in MPEG4 sucessfully.

The "NerdTV" video player isn't a player at all, but an applet that is being supplied by the very nice people from IBM Research. This is not any shipping IBM product, but rather a custom applet IBM's Michelle Kim and her crew are whipping-up just for "NerdTV." Going with an applet means there is no player application to download and install. We don't have to make a choice between Windows Media, RealPlayer, or QuickTime (actually, I suppose what we've done is reject all three).

An applet means you have to download the Player every time you view it.

If it is MPEG4, I trust he's choosing a profile that meets interoperability standards, in which case QT Player will play it and let people edit it, and RealPlayer will play MPEG4 with the Envivio plugin. It's just Windows Media Player that is deliberately shunning MPEG4 because they want to own the codecs and decide who can play things back.

If you took a 10 second look at the site you'd know that they are 'apparently not' in Tuvalu. Their contact page says Mountain View, CA: http://ism-alliance.tv/html/about/contactus.shtml

I know they're not really located in Tuvalu - it's a small Polynesian country with no resources and only 10K or so people. Prior to the internet, their biggest revenue was letting foreign countries license their phone lines (mostly for porn I believe). In 1998, Tuvalu licensed their .tv domain since it was so desirable to those foreign people with internet access.

The .tv domain (like Tonga's .to domain) was originally meant for citizens of that country. These bastardized domains also carry a slight stigma since it's not a .com or .net, and since they falsely represent the nationality of the company, I make sarcastic comments.

While other formats and versions come and go, MPEG-4 will safeguard multimedia content for a secure future.

My first reaction to this is, MPEG-4 will probably also come and go, unless it is the holy grail of video compression - we'll be able to improve it in the future. Secondly, it looks like they're quietly mentioning some DRM stuff being thrown in, which may or may not be a good thing.

The Internet Media Streaming Alliance, which is apparently located in Tuvalu, has a decent, fairly trustworthy collection of "Sponsor Members," including Apple, Cisco, IBM, Philips, and Sun Microsystems. I'd much rather trust DRM technology to these companies than Microsoft, Real, the RIAA, the MPAA, Fritz Hollings, or AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape-HBO-CNN (even though that last one is a "Participant Member"). It looks as if this latest scheme will focus on quality, while quietly adding in DRM - which is the only way it's going to work in the current climate. And I think it would be acceptable to the public: If you put out a product that is superior enough in quality, consumers are willing to sacrifice some of their time-shifting and space-shifting rights. If the balance isn't quite right, then the technology will have to be adjusted. The same thing happened with DVDs and the DivX format (the Circuit City thing) - Quality was higher, and even though the average user couldn't record DVDs and retain the same quality, consumers are increasily accepting the new techology. DivX didn't balance our fair use rights properly and failed.

I hope MPEG4 gets the balance right, so we can finally get a popularly-accepted standard for digital video. It's nice to have free video files available on P2P networks but the quality isn't there, and most of us would be willing to pay the right price to get a high-quality video file. If not, there's still regular old TV.

The article quotes Tom Jacobs on the official ISMA position on the matter, and I can vouch for that position personally. I was at our last meeting in NYC on Feb 4 when he first stated it. I can clarify a few points:

1. First, that we are unhappy with the MPEG-LA licensing terms, but we are actively pursuing discussion of those terms with them.
2. ISMA's stated charter is interoperability of rich streaming media over IP networks. It is explicitly stated that we want player-neutral protocols. If MPEG-4 licensing makes it non-player-neutral, well... draw your own conclusions.
3. We are considering many protocol options. ISMA is composed of two arms, technical and marketing. The tech guys (myself included) are all over using open-source. What remains to be seen is whether or not those solutions can provide the features that our marketing and retail appliance partners are demanding. (Hint to Ogg Tarkin guys: this is your cue to get motivated.)

MPEG-LA is composed of those companies or entities who have critical IP in MPEG-4 video and systems technologies. Two points:

• Critical IP. This means MPEG-4 can't be implemented without trampling on these guys' patents. Implementation-specific IP (i.e. a particular vendor's patented player) doesn't cut it.
• Video and systems. This doesn't cover audio. Yes, it's stupid, but that's the way it is. (Systems, btw, is all that feature-rich stuff beyond video and audio, like embedded scrolling text, etc etc)

ISMA is in charge of the de-facto standard for streaming media online. It'd be cool if we used open-source, but we have to go with what we can get that meets our requirements. The ball is in your court, Xiph. If you wanna make a name for yourselves, this is the break you've been waiting for.

Apple is not in this alone. Apple is a founding member in the Internet Streaming Media Alliance, or ISMA, which is standardizing MPEG-4 for streaming. At the Fourth ISMA forum last week, the move by MPEG-LA to apply a per stream license fee was seen as pretty brain-dead.

MPEG-4 is being rolled out for set-top boxes for Cable Companies. The MPEG-LA license fee would add a charge of almost $ 15.00 per box per month to your cable bill. This would just about double my cable bill. This will kill MPEG-4 if it is not changed.

The speculation is that this is Microsoft (a member of the license pool) trying to squelch competition, without leaving any fingerprints.