Where are we?

From: Dan Zigmond (djz@corp.webtv.net)
Date: Thu, Oct 07 1999 

Message-ID: <15AAE0EBDCC9D1119FFA00805F85642E04CFABAF@WNI-MSG-02>
From: Dan Zigmond <djz@corp.webtv.net>
To: www-tv@w3c.org
Cc: mav@liberate.com
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 17:55:08 -0700 
Subject: Where are we?

Discussions seem to have stalled again, so I thought maybe I would make an
attempt to summarize where I think we might be now in terms of a proposal to
take back to the IESG/IETF.

Several people expressed discomfort with the use of broadcast call signs of
the form KQED.  Although these are world unique and standardized by the ITU
(I think), they appear to be very uncommon outside the United States.  So I
would like to propose that we further limit the "tv:" URI to two forms:

	tv:			meaning "current channel"
	tv:<network>	where <network> is a DNS name

So some valid "tv:" URIs would be:

	tv:			[of course]
	tv:abc.com		American Broadcasting Company
	tv:abc.net.au	Australian Broadcast Corporation
	tv:kron.com		KRON in San Francisco
	tv:channel4.com	Channel 4 in the UK
	tv:west.hbo.com	HBO West
	tv:one.bbc.co.uk	BBC1

As I think we've discussed, the rule is that if you own the domain, you can
register names using that domain.  So HBO can register "west.hbo.com" as
their official name for their West Coast feed, and BBC can register
"one.bbc.co.uk" or "1.bbc.co.uk" or whatever they want for BBC1.  

I think this is a reasonably final proposal.  It basically collapses all the
other forms into the DNS namespace, and moves any dispute over names to
disputes over DNS.  (Of course, DNS disputes aren't easy to resolve, but at
least if we ever get a good mechanism there it will automatically be applied
to "tv:" URIs too.)  

I'm ready to do another revision to the Internet-Draft based on this
approach, but I thought I'd make another check for comments first.  Perhaps
we can try to have a new draft next week and get it to the IESG.

	Dan
	

--------------------------------------------------- 
Dan Zigmond 
Senior Manager, Broadcast Applications 
WebTV Networks, Inc. 
djz@corp.webtv.net 
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