A system for transmission and rendering of media data over an Internet Protocol network from portable data storage source devices to spatially-separated destination devices located at lifestyle-determined locations. Destination devices are brought online by a discovery process as they come in the vicinity of a source device. In the interest of speed, discovery messages utilize low-overhead, asynchronous messaging. The discovery process begins with multicasting from a source device to local destination devices of discovery messages which include a unique session key and zone, priority and ID specifications, followed by unicasting of a discovery acknowledgement message from destination devices to the source device, and unicasting of a configuration message from the source device to destination devices. In one preferred embodiment, the latest source device to come into the vicinity of a destination device becomes the source of the media rendered by the destination device.