IETF to overhaul media type registrations with community-based expert reviews

This technical update addresses a critical bottleneck in the streaming ecosystem: the inconsistent registration of new media formats. By shifting from 'informal' review to a community-based IETF standard, the industry gains a more predictable path for registering proprietary and emerging video formats. For engineers and streaming platform operators, this reduces the friction of introducing new codecs or metadata containers that require formal recognition for cross-platform interoperability. Moving forward, the industry should monitor the adoption of the community-based sub-policy at the upcoming IETF meeting in Seattle to see if it accelerates the intake of non-standardized playback formats.

The MEDIAMAN working group’s push for a community-based review model coincides with a broader IETF effort to modernize core registry protocols. In late June 2026, the IANA-related working group advanced draft-ietf-ianabis-rfc7120bis and draft-ietf-ianabis-rfc8126bis to address early code point allocations and general registry management, per IETF documents. These efforts are part of a coordinated strategy to provide legal and procedural cover for experts who currently exercise broad discretion when approving or denying registration requests from smaller developer communities.

In tandem with these procedural updates, IANA reported a rise in media type registration requests during the first half of 2026, including several specialized JSON-based payloads for GPU evidence and authorization challenges, per IANA registry logs. The increasing pressure on 'well-known URIs' and other limited namespaces has made high-discretion review unsustainable, leading to the demand for the formal 'specification required' sub-policies discussed by Mark Nottingham. By modularizing these policies, the IETF aims to allow different technical groups to adopt specific registration rigor levels without requiring a full RFC update for every minor registry change.

Furthermore, the focus on 'recognized standards-related organizations' (SDOs) remains a pillar of the IETF Standards Tree. While BCP 13 has historically left the definition of 'recognized' to the discretion of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), the current revisions seek more explicit documentation of what constitutes a stable technical body, per IETF 126 session proceedings. This ensures that major streaming standards from organizations like MPEG or SMPTE continue to have a streamlined path to registration while preventing smaller, non-consensus groups from using IETF stamps of approval for marketing purposes.