A Content Reference Identifier or CRID is a concept from the standardization work done by the TV-Anytime forum. It is or 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.
A CRID is specified much like URLs. In fact, a CRID is a so-called URI. 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 wanted to make a CRID for the Olympics in China. It may have looked something like this
Then, to refer to a specific event - such as the women's shot-put final - they could have used the following inside their metadata.
Currently, four types of CRIDs play a major role in some unidirectional television networks: programme CRID, series CRID, group CRID, and recommendation CRID.
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 long-term 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.
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