mediumto

Mediumto is an open, cross-platform data interchange protocol and platform designed to unify media content across formats and channels. It provides a single source of truth for media assets, metadata, and rights information, enabling creators and distributors to publish content to multiple destinations with minimal duplication.

The name combines "medium" and "to," signaling a bridge between media forms and delivery channels. The concept emerged from a loosely organized group of developers and researchers in the early 2020s, with the first public proposals released in 2022. Governance is described as community-led, with proposals reviewed via an open process and no single licensing authority.

Technical overview: The core is a content graph that represents assets, relationships, and workflows. Media items, metadata, licensing terms, and usage constraints are modeled as nodes and edges. It uses content-addressable storage for integrity and adapters to transport layers such as HTTP, WebSocket, or local file systems. It supports streaming, adaptive bitrate, and offline publication, with extensible plug-ins for transcoding and accessibility features.

Implementations and ecosystem: There are reference implementations in multiple languages and several small-scale projects that adopt mediumto as a backbone for publishing pipelines. Libraries are offered under permissive licenses; some platforms integrate mediumto via plug-ins rather than a full adoption.

Reception and status: As a developing standard, mediumto has attracted interest for its emphasis on interoperability and end-to-end provenance, but faces challenges in governance, documentation, and broad industry adoption. Proponents argue it could reduce fragmentation; critics point to complexity and the need for widely accepted tooling.