Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

From OPIMA to MPEG IPMP-X: A standard's history across R&D projects

This paper describes the work performed by a number of companies and universities who have been working as a consortium under the umbrella of the European Union Framework Programme 5 (FP5), Information Society Technologies (IST) research program, in order to provide a set of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and architectures, aiming at helping to reduce the copyright circumvention risks, that have been threatening the music and film industries in their transition from the “analogue” to “digital” age. The paper starts by addressing some of the earlier standardization efforts in the DRM arena, namely, Open Platform Initiative for Multimedia Access (OPIMA). One of the described FP5 IST projects, Open Components for Controlled Access to Multimedia Material (OCCAMM), has developed the OPIMA vision. The paper addresses also the Motion Pictures Expert Group—MPEG DRM work, starting from the MPEG Intellectual Propriety Management and Protection—IPMP “Hooks”, towards the MPEG IPMP Extensions, which has originated the first DRM-related standard (MPEG-4 Part 13, called IPMP Extensions or IPMP-X) ever released by ISO up to the present days.2 The paper clarifies how the FP5 IST project MPEG Open Security for Embedded Systems (MOSES), has extended the OPIMA interfaces and architecture to achieve compliance with the MPEG IPMP-X standard, and how it has contributed to the achievement of “consensus” and to the specification, implementation (Reference Software) and validation (Conformance Testing) of the MPEG IPMP-X standard.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Digital Rights Management and Consumer Acceptability: A Multi-Disciplinary Discussion of Consumer Concerns and Expectations

The INDICARE project – the Informed Dialogue about Consumer Acceptability of DRM Solutions in Europe – has been set up to raise awareness about consumer and user issues of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions. One of the main goals of the INDICARE project is to contribute to the consensus-building among multiple players with heterogeneous interests in the digital environment. To promote this process and to contribute to the creation of a common level of understanding is the aim of the present report. It provides an overview of consumer concerns and expectations regarding DRMs, and discusses the findings from a social, legal, technical and business perspective. A general overview of the existing EC initiatives shows that questions of consumer acceptability of DRM have only recently begun to draw wider attention. A review of the relevant statements, studies and reports confirms that awareness of consumer concerns is still at a low level. Five major categories of concerns have been distinguished so far: (1) fair conditions of use and access to digital content, (2) privacy, (3) interoperability, (4) transparency and (5) various aspects of consumer friendliness. From the legal point of view, many of the identified issues go beyond the scope of copyright law, i.e. the field of law where DRM was traditionally discussed. Often they are a matter of general or sector-specific consumer protection law. Furthermore, it is still unclear to what extent technology and an appropriate design of technical solutions can provide an answer to some of the concerns of consumers. One goal of the technical chapter was exactly to highlight some of these technical possibilities. Finally, it is shown that consumer acceptability of DRM is important for the economic success of different business models based on DRM. Fair and responsive DRM design can be a profitable strategy, however DRM-free alternatives do exist too.Digital Rights Management; consumers; Intellectual property; business models

Digital Identity Interoperability and eInnovation

This paper, one of three case studies in a transatlantic research project exploring the connection between Information and Communication Technology interoperability and eInnovation, considers the current state and possible evolution of Digital Identity. While consumers would undoubtedly reap convenience benefits from an ubiquitous single sign-on (SSO) technology, the potential for privacy and security issues makes Digital ID a complex issue. The user-centric, federated, and centralized models of Digital ID each have their advantages and drawbacks. While a few companies have previously attempted to establish a single Digital ID standard that they would control, the failure of those efforts has led to a situation where most players in the industry seem to see interoperability as essential to build up the market in the face of frequent ambivalence from consumers, e-commerce merchants, and other potential users. Broadly, Digital ID could enable a wide range of new Web-based applications, increasing consumers' flexibility and reducing transactions costs. However, having Digital ID be too ubiquitous could threaten the continued viability of anonymous speech in some contexts. It could also lead to more entities having greater access to personal data of consumers, raising the stakes of potential data breaches. The paper concludes that the route to interoperability most likely to lead to innovation would include continued collaboration among industry players to settle on one or a few consolidated efforts. Except in special areas, governments can best play a peripheral role, encouraging coordination through soft regulatory approaches like bringing stakeholders together and using their market power as major data holders and users. If privacy and security issues are addressed (and current stakeholders seem acutely aware of them), Digital ID interoperability has the potential to be extremely generative, creating new markets and enabling interoperability among other applications and services. If, however, coordination breaks down among market leaders and rival technologies emerge, it seems likely that user adoption will remain low and the benefits will be limited

Using web-services to manage and control access to multimedia content

In a largely interconnected World, the Web-Services (WS) computing paradigm is gaining momentum. Most Web Services applications existing today are being developed in the E-Business or E-Commerce context, mainly for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) [12]. This paper describes a distributed architecture that largely uses WS technology to control and manage the access to multimedia content and that represents the new and emerging market of Digital Rights Management (DRM). This architecture deploys some critical DRM elements, in a service-oriented architecture, such as device and user identification and authentication, content registration and protection, license representation and production and payment. This paper presents the conceptual architecture, referred to as OpenSDRM [3], and provides some technical details about its development and deployment.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

iDRM - Interoperability Mechanisms for Open Rights Management Platforms

Today’s technology is raising important challenges in the Intellectual Property (IP) field in general and to Copyright in particular [Arkenbout et al., 2004]. The same technology that has made possible the access to content in a ubiquitous manner, available to everyone in a simple and fast way, is also the main responsible for the challenges affecting the digital content IP of our days [Chiariglione, 2000]. Technological solutions and legal frameworks were created to meet these new challenges. From the technological point of view, Rights Management Systems (RMS) and Copy Protection Systems (CPS) have been developed and deployed to try to cope with them. At first, they seemed to work however, their closed and non-interoperable nature and a growing number of wrong strategic business decisions, soon lead to a strong opposition. One of the strongest negative points is the lack of rights management interoperability [Geer, 2004]. The work presented on this thesis primarily addresses the RMS interoperability problems. The objective of the thesis is to present some possible mechanisms to improve the interoperability between the different existing and emerging rights management platforms [Guth, 2003a]. Several different possible directions to rights management interoperability are pointed in this thesis. One of the most important is openness. Interoperability between different rights management mechanisms can only be achieved if they are open up to a certain level. Based on this concept, an open rights management platform is designed and presented in this thesis. Also, some of the interoperability mechanisms are presented and explained. This platform makes usage of the emerging service-oriented architectures to provide a set of distributed rights management services. Rights management solutions rely heavily on the establishment of authenticated and trust environments between its different elements. While considering different RMS, the establishment of such trust environments can be somehow complex. This thesis provides a contribution to the establishment of interoperable RMS trust environments through the usage of Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) mechanisms. Modern rights management systems have to handle with both keying material and licenses which are used mostly to define how content is governed by the system. Managing this is a complex and hard task when different rights management solutions are considered. This thesis presents and describes a generic model to handle the key and license management life cycle, that can be used to establish a global interoperable management solution between different RMS

Rights and services interoperability for multimedia content management

The main goal of the work presented in this thesis is to describe the definition of interoperability mechanisms between rights expression languages and policy languages. Starting from languages interoperability, the intention is to go a step further and define how services for multimedia content management can interoperate by means of service-oriented generic and standardised architectures. In order to achieve this goal, several standards and existing initiatives will be analysed and taken into account. Regarding rights expression languages and policy languages, standards like MPEG-21 Rights Expression Language (REL), Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) are considered. Regarding services for content management, the Multimedia Information Protection And Management System (MIPAMS), a standards-based implemented architecture, and the Multimedia Service Platform Technologies (MSPT), also known as MPEG-M standard, are considered. The contribution of this thesis is divided into two parts, one devoted to languages interoperability and the other one devoted to services interoperability, both addressed to multimedia content management. They are briefly described next. The first part of the contribution describes how MPEG-21 REL, ODRL and XACML can interoperate, defining the mapping mechanisms to translate expressions from language to language. The mappings provided have different levels of granularity, starting from a mapping based on a programmatic approach coming from high-level modelling diagrams done using Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Entity-Relationship (ER). The next level of mappings includes specific mappings between MPEG-21 REL and XACML and ODRL and XACML. Finally, a more general solution is proposed by using a broker. Part of this work was done in the context of the VISNET-II Network of Excellence and the AXMEDIS Integrated Project. The findings done prove the validity of the interoperability methods described. The second part of the contribution describes how to describe standards based building blocks to provide interoperable services for multimedia content management. This definition is based on the analysis of existing content management use cases, from the ones involving less security over multimedia content managed to the ones providing full-featured digital rights management (DRM) (including access control and ciphering techniques) to support secure content management. In this section it is also presented the work done in the research projects AXMEDIS, Musiteca and Culturalive. It is also shown the standardisation work done for MPEG-M, particularly on elementary services and service aggregation. To demonstrate the usage of both technologies a mobile application integrating both MPEG-M and MIPAMS is presented. Furthermore, some conclusions and future work is presented in the corresponding section, together with the refereed publications, which are briefly described in the document. In summary, the work presented can follow different research lines. On the one hand, further study on rights expression languages and policy languages is required as new versions of them have recently appeared. It is worth noting the standardisation of a contract expression language, MPEG-21 CEL, which has also to be further analysed in order to evaluate its interoperability with rights and policy languages. On the other hand, standard initiatives must be followed in order to complete the map of SB3's, considering MPEG standards and also other standards not only related to multimedia but also other application scenarios, like e-health or e-government

Dynamic multimedia adaptation and updating of media streams with MPEG-21

The paper discusses media streaming using dynamic resource adaptation and update as a means of facilitating universal multimedia access (UMA): the concept of accessing multimedia content through a variety of possible schemes (Bormans, J. et al., IEEE Sig. Process. Magazine, 2003). As background, the paper summarizes the most common content negotiation approaches and addresses their facets and problems. MPEG-21, the multimedia framework and its relationship to UMA are then explained. Our primary focus is an end-to-end approach to content adaptation which takes advantage of MPEG-21 to facilitate the UMA concept in a media streaming environment. The concept is validated using a media streaming test-bed which provides for wide adaptation according to broad usage descriptions