BARCELONA – A new industry consortium known as the DASH Promoters Group has announced plans to drive the broad adoption of MPEG's DASH (dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP) standard.
Ratified in November 2011, DASH is designed to address the dramatic growth of Internet video by defining a universal delivery format, which provides end users with the best possible video experience and dynamically adapts to changing network conditions as video streams to their devices. It incorporates all of the best elements of proprietary adaptive streaming solutions designed to solve the classic issues users see when they stream video such as intermittent stalls, poor video quality under changing network conditions, and significant video start-up lag.
Microsoft, Netflix, and Qualcomm are the founding members, and other companies recently announced include: Adobe, AEG Digital Media, Akamai, BuyDRM, Digital Rapids, Digital TV Labs, Dolby, EBU-UER, Elemental, Envivio, Ericsson, Harmonic, Intertrust, NDS, Packet Ship, Path1, RGB Networks, Samsung, Thomson, University of Klagenfurt, and ZiXi.
In addition to promoting broad adoption of DASH, the Promoters Group will focus on aligning ongoing DASH standards development, promoting the use of common profiles across industry organizations, and facilitating interoperability tests and plug-fests to demonstrate the usability and completeness of the DASH standard.
The DASH Promoters Group is also working toward recommended deployment configurations for DASH, informally called DASH-264. This would enable a minimum set of DASH requirements for the industry and help enable further commercialization of mobile devices that support it.
