DASH of this, DASH of that...

It's apparent that MPEG-DASH is getting traction—or at least attention—if attendance at the 2011 StreamingMedia West show's panel on MPEG-DASH is any indicator.

It wasn't just standing-room, as alluded to in the StreamingMedia.com article, but was sitting-room only. It's been quite some time since I've seen this level of interest in a topic.

A few notes that didn't make it into the article:


MPEG-DASH will never define a codec, but with DASH-264 there's a move to use an H.264 codec in an MP4 container with a common file format (CFF) and common encryption (CENC).... There's also a possibility of adding DASH-264 into the HTML5 standard, since W3C requires a codec to be considered in HTML5 but MPEG-DASH itself is codec agnostic.


Interesting note about who has been participating and who has not:


Apple has been participating in MPEG-DASH from the beginning; they have contributed actively. We've not seen Google participating in DASH, but our codec agnostic approach means that WebM could be used within DASH (we can already do with profiles around M2TS).


What about royalties? An audience member's question got this reply:

From a licensing standpoint, there is a requirement to notify ISO of their intent to license; Qualcomm and Cisco have announced they'll offer royalty-free since HTTP adaptive streaming has been done for a number of years but to get to a standard we need to see a path forward to royalty-free licensing.

Netflix or Blockbuster: Do Either Offer Total Access?

When it comes to online streaming of premium content, it appears that less is less instead of more.

Netflix stumbled badly, announcing this week that 800,000 subscribers left the service last quarter—over 200,000 more than the company had predicted as its "worst case" scenario. Part of the stumble was an assumption that customers would pay the same amount for online video access to a limited number of movies as they would for a much broader library of DVDs delivered by mail.

I covered this topic two days ago in an online article for StreamingMedia.com, a newsletter and magazine for which I have freelanced for a number of years. After the article was published, a radio station in Seattle, KOMO, requested a phone interview which I did on the 26th.

In addition, the editor of StreamingMedia.com, Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, was also asked to be part of a section on Netflix on PBS Newshour show this evening.

To say this topic is hot would be an understatement, and Eric did a good job bringing to light—in a public forum—what we've often said on StreamingMedia.com: the online premium content world is still nascent and needs to grow to match the expectation (or hype) that many in our industry have pushed when trying to make streaming inventories equal to offline availability.

There's a need for a consolidated approach to online video libraries, ideally through a broader offering of content by a single provider; in the meantime, I'll also cover another approach that indexes what's available on multiple sites. Look for that article in a few weeks.