After its proof of concept trial during the Olympics TV coverage, MPEG-DASH has been one of the buzz subjects of IBC.
Introducing it to a wider audience, EBU project manager Bram Tullemans explained: “It is a streaming protocol that unifies the protocols from Microsoft, Adobe and Apple. The key advantage is adaptive streaming over HTTP, so it can automatically change bit rates according to the bandwidth available.”
Content providers get a single file format for delivering to all devices, and the system corrects itself if there is bad bandwidth, or if there is maximum bandwidth. HTTP means content will penetrate firewalls at offices.
“It will also use standard web caches, and you now need no proprietary hardware,” said Tullemans. “The new thing for IBC is that we can show it working on HbbTV. It is also working on iOS.
“We define the publication of one hour and now you can do time shifting,” he added. “You just swipe the scroll bar to the left and go back into time to create a sort of merging of linear and on-demand services, because it is not a reference to a loose file anymore. It is just integrated in the live stream.”
VRT has put a link on its sports site for the demo. What next? “It is a fairly fresh standard so a lot of integration is still needed by people – companies like Apple and a group of Android users,” said Tullemans.
– George Jarrett
