Delivering Audio and Video with Rich Site Summary Enclosures

Rich Site Summary (RSS) technology is a web content syndication format commonly used to organise news and the content of news-like sites. Indeed any information that can be broken down into ‘discrete items’ can be syndicated via RSS. RSS has been extended to include tags known as RSS enclosures which allow audio and video to be described in terms of location, duration and size. Once data about each element is established in an RSS format, a program called an aggregator can check the feed frequently for changes and updates and act accordingly. This paper documents a scheduled RSS Multimedia prototype which utilises idle computer time (at night) to subscribe to media RSS channels in order to download audio and video content. Thus when the user arrives in the morning, there are fresh clips ‘sitting on the desktop’. Now when a video link is now clicked, it starts playing immediately, as it is already on the local disk thus the wait is zero.