Syndicate Rich Media
Media RSS can tell Yahoo! and the world about your audio and video.
Web publishers have been using the syndication format RSS to move text around the Internet since 1999. Typically, an RSS feed contains summaries of news stories or weblog posts and URLs that point to the permanent location of those pieces of text. The type of content that could be delivered via RSS expanded when the format added support for enclosures. Enclosures are like email attachments and can be used to include any type of binary file, including audio and video.
This support for enclosures led to a new form of audio distribution called podcasting, which lets people subscribe to audio shows via an RSS file and automatically download new episodes to an iPod or other portable media player. This new distribution method has generated an explosion of independent audio content and a new audience for that content.
Looking forward, it’s not hard to imagine a similar scenario with video content. Anyone with a computer and a digital video camera can produce their own content, and the Internet is a perfect distribution system for those digital bits. Video syndication poses some additional challenges, but Yahoo! has already started building the tools necessary for video syndication.
Introducing Media RSS
Yahoo! wanted something more flexible for publishers of audio and video than a single “attachment” for items in their RSS feed. And they wanted publishers to be able to describe those media files in ...
Get Yahoo! Hacks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
