A diverse group of technology leaders has announced the creation of the DASH Promoters Group, a new organization dedicated to driving the broad adoption of MPEG's DASH (dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP) standard.
As part of their strategy to accelerate DASH adoption, the Promoter's Group had demonstrated DASH streaming video at the recent Mobile World Congress 2012.
"Demonstrating the live ingest of DASH content and the dynamic synthesis of DASH manifests and segments is the first step toward DASH leveraging the benefits of capacity, efficiency, and security brought by the Akamai Intelligent Platform," said Will Law, principal architect, Media Division, Akamai.
The membership of the DASH Promoters Group represents a significant cross section of major players across the multimedia and video delivery value chain. Microsoft, Netflix, and Qualcomm are the founding members. Other companies rounding out the membership at the time of this announcement 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.
With the formation of the Promoters Group and significant interest from a variety of companies, commercial DASH solutions are expected this year and the current members expect their ranks to swell.
DASH is designed to address the classic issues users see when they stream video: intermittent stalls, poor video quality under changing network conditions, and significant video start-up lag.
"We believe DASH is the only way to effectively scale video over the Internet. We're excited to be the first video company to demonstrate solutions based on DASH technology at Mobile World Congress,” said Thierry Fautier, senior director of convergence solutions at Harmonic Inc.
