About the Registry

Application Name/Prefix Registry

To ensure that the correct name for each application is well-defined, and to avoid naming conflicts, Application Names must be registered in the DIAL Application Name Registry. The registry is maintained on dial-multiscreen.org and is made available to anyone implementing or using the DIAL protocol.

Who Should Register

• • 1st screen applications—the registry is only needed, and only useful for 1st screen applications. If you, or your organization has developed a 1st screen application, and that application is publicly available on a device, or in an app marketplace, you can register the app name. 

  • Existing non-DIAL apps—you may register an app name even if the devices it runs on do not currently implement the DIAL protocol.

  • App name prefixes—if you have multiple 1st screen applications that will be named with a common prefix, and wish to reserve a name prefix. For example if you have the following apps: acme-videoPlayer, acme-musicJukebox, acme-pictureGallery – reserve the prefix acme-.

Who Should Not Register 

• • 2nd screen applications— since the protocol is unaware of 2nd screen app names, it is not useful or necessary to register them. 

  • Competitive or defensive business uses—since there is no consumer facing component of these names (they are only used programmatically), there is no business or brand advantage to securing names for apps that don't actually exist.  

Naming Rules

• 1. Application Names may be registered explicitly, or a set of Application Names with a common prefix may be registered by registering an Application Prefix.

  2. Application Names and Prefixes MUST consist of a sequence of characters matching the pchar production of RFC3986 [3]. Matching of Application Names and Prefixes is case-sensitive and SHALL be performed after decoding percent-encoded characters (i.e. the three character sequence ‘%30’ matches the single character ‘0’.)

  3. An Application Prefix MUST be at least four (4) characters in length (after decoding percent-encoded characters) and must include a recognizable company name. For example: “Acme-”, “com.acme”.

  4. Application names can only be registered if the application is actually available in the market and there is no conflict with previously registered names or prefixes. 

  5. Application prefixes can be registered if the company name in the prefix is actively delivering applications or devices that run them to the market. 

  6. Names or prefixes that may be confused with previous registrations (e.g., “netflix”, “youtube”, “Y0uTube”, etc.), or are not intended for use with DIAL, may not be registered.

Register Application Name or view the Application Name Registry

Registry Audit

The DIAL maintainer may periodically audit the registry, and may remove inappropriate entries (after contacting, or attempting to contact the registrant at the provided email address).