Sunday, August 21, 2005

Sun Unveils Open Media Commons initiative

Sun Microsystems unveiled the Open Media Commons initiative, an open-source community project developing a royalty-free digital rights management standard.


Sun promised to immediately share the entirety of its internal Sun Labs program Project DReaM (DRM/everywhere available) with the Open Media Commons 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.


"We are entering the Participation Age -- an age where individuals are creating and supplying the news as much as they are consuming it. 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. 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," said Jonathan Schwartz, speaking at the Progress and Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit, Sun president.
http://www.openmediacommons.org/
  • Earlier this year, Sun Microsystems released its Solaris OS as open source code for both the SPARC platform and x86/x64 platforms. The OpenSolaris source code includes the core operating system, networking, system libraries, and commands--and all the key innovations delivered in the Solaris 10 OS.


  • In June 2005, Sun Microsystems launched its Open Service Delivery Platform Solutions Program aimed at helping telecommunications service providers deliver new, differentiated revenue-generating consumer and enterprise services utilizing technologies such as IMS and VoIP. Sun is presenting a framework that makes use of end-to-end Java and can leverage the carrier-grade Solaris operating system. Sun is collaborating with an ecosystem of industry leaders, including Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), Systems Integrators (SIs) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to build out the framework. Among the initial partners announced by Sun to build out this framework are Appium, Drutt, EDS, jNetx, Open Cloud and Terraplay. Examples include a solution that lets users purchase, download and play multi-player games and then voice conference with the other players using an existing mobile network.