Crid

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CRID is a concept from the standardization work done by the TV-Anytime forum. A CRID or a Content Reference Identifier closely matches the concept of the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, as used on the World-Wide Web:

A unit of content, in a broadcast stream, can be referred to by its globally unique CRID in the same way that a webpage can be referred to by its globally unique URL on the web.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that a CRID is specified much like URLs. Typically, the content owner will use their DNS-names in a combination with a product-specific name to create globally unique CRIDs. As an example, let's assume that BBC wants to make a CRID for the upcoming Olympics in China. It may look something like this

crid://bbc.co.uk/olympics/2008/

Then, to refer to a specific event - such as the women's shotput finale - they can use the following inside their metadata.

crid://bbc.co.uk/olympics/2008/finale/shotput/women

[edit] CRID for webcasting

To make the CRID even more globally available the IETF will publish a request for comments specifying the use of the CRID over the web. This will allow consumer devices to hook up to content provider servers, much like current browsers look up webservers, requesting content by CRID.

In May 2005 an Informational RFC, No 4078, was published as the start of this work.

The longterm goal is that CRIDs should be available for use by cell phones, PDAs, digital TV receivers and other consumer devices for fetching content, either from a broadcast stream or over IP-based networks.