News
Sun Dreams about a Participation Age
- By ADT Staff
- August 23, 2005
Sun Microsystems President and COO Jonathan Schwartz has been talking up the
company’s Open Media Commons initiative, an open-source community project
developing a royalty-free digital rights management standard. Schwartz is calling
for immediate cross-industry collaboration in developing an open, safe and business-friendly
approach to the free creation, duplication and distribution of digital content.
"We are entering the Participation Age, an age where individuals are creating
and supplying the news as much as they are consuming it,” Schwartz says.
“Mobile phones play music and take pictures, high-quality video is delivered
to almost any device on earth, and legitimate global P2P networks are being
created that will transform the way we live," Schwartz says.
"The demand for new network services is exploding. Incredible economic
value is waiting to be tapped, but we must not allow progress to be stifled
by clumsy, self-defeating Internet tollgates in the form of a monolithic, closed
digital rights management system,” Schwartz asserts.
Sun will share its internal Sun Labs program Project DReaM (DRM/everywhere
available) with the community under the OSI-approved Common Development and
Distribution License (CDDL). Sun Labs Project DReaM consists of:
- DRM-OPERA: An interoperable DRM architecture implementing standardized
interfaces and processes for the interoperability of DRM systems. The DRM-OPERA
architecture is independent of specific hardware and operating systems, and
is not restricted to specific media formats. It enables user-based license
provision, as opposed to today's situation where licenses are assigned to
devices.
- Java Stream Assembly: Launch pad for Video Delivery Servers using the Java
Stream Assembly (JSR-158) API, which reduces the complexity in building and
managing video streams to be delivered over access networks. Multiple vendor
components can be plugged in using the Java Stream Assembly API for delivering
broadcast, on-demand and interactive TV streams.
- Sun Streaming Server (SSS): Designed to serve standards-compliant media
(audio/video) streams over IP using open-standard protocols such as RTP and
RTSP. SSS is compliant with 3GPP and ISMA specifications. While the server
is agnostic to the format of the media, the streams served by SSS are generally
encoded using the MPEG-4 codecs. SSS supports MPEG-4 and QuickTime out of
the box.
More information on the Open Media Commons can be found at Open
Media Commons.