Re: DAP rechartering discussion

On 2011-03-21, at 20:23 , Mark Watson wrote:

>> [...]
>> One thing that I like a lot about the way in which UC is currently specified is that one can easily split various bits off. There could be a UC Core specification with everything that's absolutely required, and then the other parts could be independent components. Since they're already optional and have a discovery mechanism, it should be relatively easy.

Fully second that.


>> In my experience from writing EPG apps though, I have to say that having some baseline search and metadata interoperability would be very, very nice. This doesn't have to be all-powerful (that's too hard a problem to solve) but at least some minimally common parts (navigating categories, simple full text search) helps a lot.
> 
> In the interest of provoking debate, I'd say that I'm not sure the concept of a universal "EPG" is valid in the "web&tv" world at all. There is no "Electronic Web Guide" for the web. We have search engines, but these are 'as thin as possible' to get you as fast as possible to the site you want: they do not constrain sites to be described in some particular metadata format, but there are tools for sites to describe themselves to search engines if they wish. If you know what site you want, you go can straight to that and, either way, the site then has control of your user experience when you get there.

Of course I could imagine why Mark would prefer a service-specific client. ;-) And there should be nothing that prevented him from doing that or even would make it hard for him. It should be easy.

But I also agree with Robin that there should be a common baseline. Otherwise we won't be able to ensure a minimum level of user experience. So IMHO there should be this baseline, and there should be pre-defined slots for proprietary extensions. To make them proprietary as opposed to closed, the extensions should be be identified in a MIME-type-like way. UPnP did the same for DVB metadata. They defined a generic container labeled "foreign metadata", and one of the container attributes is the "metadata format".

> I think we should be enabling similar models for TV services and for multi-device services as well. 

I'm nopt quite sure what Mark refers to here. Home network?


Cheers,

  --alex

Received on Friday, 1 April 2011 16:43:41 UTC