Accessing media contents with MediaStream

Hi everyone, 

Just want to share some thoughts on the topic of accessing media contents broadcast by providers. 

Since there is no doubt on rendering TV contents via <video> and <audio>, we (Mozilla) were debating on accessing media contents with URI-base schema or MediaStream[1] objects. The final call in our TV Manager API[2] draft chose MediaStream, using MediaStream objects to represent contents streamed by a TV tuner. 

Here are the reasons of advocating MediaStream: 
- MediaStream contains a lot more information then URIs, e.g. numbers or types of contained tracks. 
- MediaStream knows which tracks are "alive", it itself is a concept of streaming data. 
- MediaStream plug in well with existing media functionality in the web platform, such as Media Recorder, Web Audio, ...etc. 
- MediaSteram are much simplified at the phase of resource selection and resource fetching. 
- Tracks contained within a MediaStream (MediaStreamTrack) provide other useful information, such as capabilities, constrains, ...etc. 

[1] http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/getusermedia.html#mediastream 
[2] http://seanyhlin.github.io/TV-Manager-API/#tvtuner-interface 

Thank you very much. 

Cheers, 
Shelly