Content reference identifier
CRID - Content Reference Identifier, specified by the TV-Anytime forum.
The CRID concept
CRID is a concept from the standardization work done by the TV-Anytime forum. A CRID or a Content Reference Identifier closely matches the concept of the Uniform Resource Locator or URL, made famous by the stunning success of the World-Wide Web:
A unit of content, in a broadcast stream, can be referred to by its globally unique CRID in the same way that a webpage can be referred to by its globally unique URL on the web.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that a CRID is specified much like URLs. Typically, the content owner will use their DNS-names in a combination with a product-specific name to create globally unique CRIDs. As an example, let's assume that BBC wants to make a CRID for the upcoming Olympics in China. It may look something like this
crid://www.bbc.co.uk/olympics/2008/
Then, to refer to a specific event - such as the women's shotput finale - they can use the following
crid://www.bbc.co.uk/olympics/2008/finale/shotput/women
inside their metadata.
CRID for webcasting
To make the CRID even more globally available the IETF will publish a RFC specifying the use of the CRID over the web. This will allow consumer devices to hook up to content provider servers, much like current browsers look up webservers, requesting content by CRID.
In May 2005 an Informational RFC, #4078, was published as the start of this work.
The longterm goal is that CRIDs should be available for use by cell phones, PDAs, digtal TV receivers and other consumer devices for fetching content, either from a broadcast stream or over IP-based networks. And maybe, just maybe, the revolution in viewing TV content, based on CRID-referencing, will be as dramatic as the one instigated by the invention of HTTP!
References
- http://www.tv-anytime.org/ Accessed August 26, 2005
- http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=4078 Accessed August 26, 2005