Subject: [CDNi] FYI:

From: ZhouZhipeng <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:29:49 +0000

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From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Michael A Dolan
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 10:55 PM
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Subject: [IIF-ARCH] FW: Streaming Media Magazine: DASH uses CFF

FYI

MPEG DASH: The File Format of the Future? - Streaming Media Magazine

"If HLS were perfect, DASH would not exist," said Thierry Fautier,
Harmonic's senior director of telco solutions, referring to Apple's
proprietary HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol and the newer MPEG-backed
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG DASH) standard specification.
 
"What Apple has introduced to IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) is
merely an informational draft," added another panelist on the five-person
panel. "We don't see that they're necessarily planning to push HLS as a true
internet standard."
 
The MPEG DASH panel, led by Microsoft's Iraj Sodagar, who has chaired the
MPEG subcommittee on DASH for the past year, was a hot ticket at the 2011
Streaming Media West show, held this week at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza
in Los Angeles. A standing-room only crowd listened to representatives from
a number of companies that are on the MPEG-DASH promoters' group.
 
"More than 50 companies and 90 experts have contributed to the MPEG-DASH
specification," said Sodagar during his introductory remarks, "including
Apple, Adobe, and all the companies represented here today. The proposed
first-step of MPEG-DASH is on the verge of completion, and we feel we took
best of best practices and incorporated them into the standard."
 
"The growth of video over mobile networks is exponential, from a Qualcomm
perspective," said Mike Luby, Qualcomm's vice president of technology. "As
such we see getting standardization around video as very important and we
participated heavily in the standards committee to make sure there was an
adaptive-optimized common format that can be delivered via standard web
servers, using common encryption."
 
The common file format (CFF) that Luby refers to is based on the UltraViolet
CFF that the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) published along
with a Common Encryption (CENC) scheme that uses five distinct digital
rights management (DRM) schemes in an interoperable manner.
 
"We also see a value in unmuxed audio and video," added Luby, using an
example of non-multiplexed elementary audio streams in a variety of
languages for an "online DVD" equivalent as an example. "Above all, we
welcome the chance to use a modern file format all delivered in an open
standard."
 
Will Law, Akamai's principal architect for media engineering, offered his
perspective from a content delivery network (CDN) perspective.
 
"We're pushing 8.5 terabits today," said Law, referring to a recent peak
record that Akamai set for simultaneous CDN content delivery.
 
"We've spent the past five years delivering a variety of adaptive video
formats-SmoothHD, HDNI, HLS and HDS-all of which are 80 percent the same but
100 percent incompatible," said Law.
 
"We need to use HTTP to keep up with the demand curve for video on the web,
but we can't do it with proprietary servers, since that means splitting our
resources into three parts and trying to deliver equally to all three
parts," he added. "What we really need to do is use all our edge cache
servers for one standard, so that we and our users can focus on content and
marketing rather than replicating the same thing three times for three
separate streaming server solutions."
 
Asked by an audience member about the benefit of an HTTP solution, using
standard HTTP servers, for Akamai as a CDN, Law said he felt Akamai's
intelligent cloud could do some interesting things at the edge of DASH that
standard HTTP servers cannot do.
 
A representative from Netflix, senior engineer Mark Watson, said that
MPEG-DASH was a natural extension of what his company is already doing to
deliver fragmented MPEG-4 video via HTTP to a large number of streaming
customers.
 
"We're already using these file formats, and we see huge cache efficiencies
of a single file format," said Watson. "We feel we can lower CDN costs by
using a standard web but we also see the DRM agnosticism of MPEG-DASH across
multiple consumer electronics devices using Common Encryption (CENC) will
benefit premium content owners whose content we deliver.
 
Watson also alluded to the online DVD equivalent, thanks in part to the use
of elementary streams (those not multiplexed together like Apple's
proprietary HLS protocol).
 
"We see unmuxed audio and video elementary streams as a way to effortlessly
allow multi-language experiences," said Watson, "mimicking the offline
multi-audio DVD experience. In doing so, we see a huge benefit to having an
open standard that's a collaboration of a number of companies in the
streaming space."
 
Ericsson's David Price, vice president of business development for the
company's compression business, said consumer behavior and a move to mobile
devices is driving the need for a common standard.
 
"Changes in consumer behavior that are driving the need for MPEG-DASH, at
least according to our consumersurveys where we interview people from 40
countries," said Price. "We saw a need for a common delivery solution when
we started into 3GPP unicastyears ago, and those learnings form much of the
basis of MPEG-DASH, along with technology contributions from other companies
on this panel."
 
"We also see a need to make money in the ecosystem," added Price. "Ericsson
sees there's a need for content management systems, third-party billing and
back-office solutions. We all agree on the efficacy of the standard for
delivery and to create a robust ecosystem."
 
Panelists were asked about the expected timeframe for DASH-compliant
players, and Price stressed interoperability is key.
 
"Even though we don't know where the tipping point will be for DASH, as HLS
is widespread," said Price, "we think that the time spent on the commonality
of MPEG-DASH will be time well spent. Everyone at this table wants to
promote interoperability.
 
Harmonic's Fautier said it's about the need to move to television-sized
audiences.
 
"We've been successful with our ProMedia transcoding products," said
Fautier, "but we feel that there's a need for a standard to be able to scale
adaptive streaming to a TV-sized audience. To that end, all our ProMedia
solutions are software upgradable to MPEG-DASH using a special software
license."
 
Fautier also said that, in connected TV space in Europe, there's a move to
go to MPEG-DASH.
 
"We expect to see a common file format with common encryption beginning in
2012," said Fautier, "perhaps using Marlin, one of the five DRM schemes, as
a standard. France and Spain will be implementing first."