Thoughts: Open Standards and Technology for Movie Rental Business
28 Jul 2011I have been thinking about open-standards for movie-rental business. I searched to find about such standards but I couldn't locate. Do you know of any?
Basically, a set of specifications/protocols which can be implemented by different players in movie-rental chain. Players include studios, distributor, application-developers, portals, et. al.
Rough thoughts:
- A studio/distributor implements this specification/protocol and exposes API for metadata/streaming(or playback)/file-access from their own server
- Third party developers use the API to to pull metadata and play the content
- Third party developers can charge the user and split the revenue with content owner
- Or, studios/distributors can enable payment-gatway APIs as part of their offering
- Content is always played directly from studio/distributor's server
- Studio/distributor have total control over their assets and also charge based on subscription/per-access
This would solve many problems (billing, stats, etc.), however, there would be concerns:
- someone (end-user, third-party developer) might try to cache/save streams as file and distribute
- and other concerns?
Once we have specifications and protocols in place - a stack using open-source technologies can be built as template, and made available so that everyone in chain can use/customize it to build their part.
I wanted to talk about it on twitter but 140 chars were too short to express my thoughts. Anyway, it's good to have a blog post in place.
Please share your views.