Hi Tristan -

This was a great side-by-side comparison. Thank for posting and
spreading your thoughts through other channels.

Ok, here's the low down, since there's obviously been some discussion.

As far as I'm aware, no one from Apple ever approached us about
cooperating on this. In big companies, things get lost so that's not
saying that an overture was or was not made.

Personally, I don't think anything provided is different from what we,
as a fairly open group, were trying to accomplish with Media RSS. The
differences could have been fairly easily resolved with some minor tweaks.

So, here's effectively a summary of how we feel about this. Yahoo
doesn't want a proprietary format in regards to media syndication. We
don't want anything "owned" by a specific company or group. We realize
that it's more to our benefit to cooperate and work together to
consolidate on a standard because it will benefit us far greater in
the end. Our ultimate end goal for Media RSS is to hand it over to an
independent body that doesn't have the needs of any specific company.
With that being said, it's always helpful if someone embraces such a
standard in the beginning and gets things going.... which is what we
are trying to do.

Professionally speaking, we want to work with anyone and everyone to
get this specification to have all the functionality that is required.
Since we've launched this proposal, you'd be surprised by who has
actually reached out to us in a cooperative manner to add whatever
functionality that they desired. This spirit of cooperation is what we
want, and ultimately what everyone needs in the end.

What this means to rss feed authors: Just like you, we don't want 10
different proposals floating around that you have to add to your feeds
in order to satisfy Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Google, AOL, my aunt
Edna, etc etc. To be short, Yahoo "gets it". As far as we are
concerned, we'd drop Media RSS entirely if something else provided the
functionality that was required for true efficient media syndication.
We feel that we've been fairly open with our approach to Media RSS,
and we welcome others to cooperate on this. It's not difficult to
reach us and make real changes, as you as a group have proven.

For the ongoing future, we'll continue to improve Media RSS and
incorporate the needs from various groups and companies. There are a
few changes that I'll be submitting to the group for review in the
very near future. As always, your comments and insight will go a long
way in shaping this module. And hopefully, we'll be able to agree upon
something that satisfies the majority.

Let's keep working on trying to create a real standard, and see if the
spirit of cooperation forces it to succeed. Exciting times indeed...

-David

--- In rss-media@yahoogroups.com, "Tristan Louis" <tristan@t...> wrote:
> I did a side by side comparison of Media RSS and iTunes RSS and posted
> suggestions at
>
http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/RSS_and_Media:_Can't_we_all_just_get_along?
>
> Am I just dreaming? Is it possible to merge the two? Does anyone have
> any feedback on this?
>
> TNL