The State of MPEG-DASH Deployment
The most noteworthy evolution since IBC 2013, at least in terms of delivery, has been the progression of the StreamRoot peer-assisted delivery solution, which relies on HTML5 and WebRTC, and now supports both VOD and live streaming in ISOBMFF profiles.
“We use MPEG-DASH to do ABR in browsers, especially Chrome and soon Firefox and Internet Explorer. We chose DASH because it's the easiest to implement with MSE,” says StreamRoot co-founder Nikolay Rodionov. “And we don't regret it, as this is an emerging technology which we see growing in the upcoming years.”
How does this choice relate to the current state of upstream workflows? “Many pure players use Wowza, so it's very easy for them to switch to DASH,” Rodionov says. “For TV channels using other solutions, we wait for them to upgrade. Still, we have one ongoing VOD deployment and several tests ongoing for live in Europe.”
On the delivery side, Akamai is also releasing a new live DASH ingest service this spring that will allow broadcasters to overcome the need for origin servers if they want to stream DASH. In the packaging area, Intertrust will soon release an open-source MP4 VOD packager (for Smooth Streaming and DASH) based on Node.js. EBU is also working on the MPEG-DASH Reference Test Platform. This is a reference software workflow (for both live and VOD use cases) that integrates open-source solutions like GPAC MP4Box/Dashcast, FFMpeg, and the Dash.js player, with support for an extensive features set, including several subtitling formats and multi-audio.
“As all the reference files are coming from encoder companies, I thought it would make sense to craft a reference workflow allowing you to see what's happening and how files are generated, to have an always up-to-date reference implementation when the DASH specification is evolving,” says Bram Tullemans, project manager at EBU. “We want to create some more momentum around the whole implementation of DASH, a space where the people could meet and discuss settings and best practices on the platform. We made it modular, so we can create new workflows by adding new modules. That's what we do for HEVC.”
The European Broadcast Union (EBU) has instituted the MPEG-DASH Reference Test Platform, using the workflow demonstrated here.
HEVC with DASH is precisely the next step. In fact, it has already started, says Unified Streaming’s Griffioen. “We have an ongoing project based on HEVC, DASH, and PlayReady for a European telco—and it’s not a lab one,” he says.
“There are respectable people who don't see a commercial output for DASH,” says Bringuier. “They think that the day we do HEVC/4K it will not be in DASH.”
But the general opinion is rather positive, according to Watson. “If someone writes a spec for HEVC and MPEG-2 TS, I guess that could work with HLS, but for us there's definitely no reason to explore that. We'll be using DASH with HEVC as well,” he says.
Bringuier agrees. “One major advantage of DASH is that it provides a bridge between AVC and HEVC: it allows you to reuse the same workflow—including DRMs and probes— while making the codec evolve. It makes the workflows future-proofed,” he says.
Indeed, DASH’s momentum seems unstoppable. “There is no more need to convince people,” Fautier says. “DASH-IF has done a good education job. Up to now DASH was a soft revolution, but actually it will transform into a real wave with HEVC.” DASH-IF’s Law says the DASH-265 guidelines should be ratified at the organization’s spring meeting and released soon afterwards.
“In the near future you will see a lot more public large scale deployments of DASH,” Law says. “It won’t be a sudden take-over, but DASH will dominate in terms of deployments in 3 to 5 years. It's accelerating already.”
[A version of this article will appear in the May issue of Streaming Media magazine, and in the Summer European edition of the magazine.]
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