The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) was a non-profit corporation founded in December 2000, by

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, Kasenna,

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, and

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

. Its stated mission was to accelerate the market adoption of open standards for streaming and progressive download of

rich media Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, variou ...

over all types of

Internet Protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. ...

s (IP). It was an alliance with representatives from various points of the streaming work-flow. At the time ISMA was created, standards already existed for audio and video codecs (e.g.

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and fi ...

) and for real time streaming transport over IP networks (e.g. RTP). ISMA worked on selecting profiles, describing payload formats, and resolving various options of these standards. ISMA specifications typically adopted existing specifications. However, when specifications did not exist, the ISMA could create them. ISMA also performed interoperability testing, allowing its members to ensure that their products conformed to ISMA standards and interoperate.

Specifications

ISMA released several specifications for the transport of rich media over IP: * ISMA 1.0 - detailing how to stream

MPEG-4 Part 2 MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual (formally ISO/ IEC 14496-2) is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosi ...

video (Simple Profile and Advanced Simple Profile) over IP networks * ISMA 2.0 - detailing how to stream H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video and

HE-AAC High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/ IEC 14496–3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC (AAC-LC) optimized f ...

audio over IP networks * ISMACryp - specifying an

end-to-end encryption End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, malicious actors, and eve ...

system for ISMA 1.0 and 2.0 streams * ISMA Closed Captioning - specifying how to carry closed caption (line 21) data as a third stream over an IP network

References

{{reflist

External links

ISMA Official Website
(archived from the original on December 19, 2011)
ISMA technical specifications
at MPEG industry forum Internet protocols Non-profit corporations Organizations established in 2000