How Windows Azure Sees the Future of MPEG-DASH Adoption
MPEG-DASH was a popular topic at the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, with many companies giving their view on where it's headed. In one first day session, Kilroy Hughes, a senior digital media architect for Windows Azure Media Services, spoke about the difference DASH will make, but first he explained the Azure platform.
"I'm in the Windows Media Azure Service group, which builds media services on top of the Azure cloud platform. The Azure cloud platform is an operating system on data servers that span the globe," Hughes explained. "There are roughly a million computer cores available to allocate to tasks like encoding and streaming. Media services are a platform for others to build television channels or movie services -- anything that you can think of to do with audio/video. Rather than having people have to program all that, they can just go to a website, use REST APIs, configure ten television channels, and stream them globally."
The Azure team believes DASH and HTML5 are critical steps for the increase in streaming audio and video.
"We see DASH as a very important enabler to scale up the potential of video delivery over the internet," Hughes said. "Assuming we're successful, it will be a major share of the TV and movies delivered in the next few years. One of the things that is really crucial to that success is implementation in HTML5 browsers. That allows the publisher to decide what format they're going to deliver just by including some JavaScript in a webpage."
Once HTML5 is ubiquitous, publishers will be able to write once and play on a billion devices, Hughes added.
For more, watch the full discussion below and download the presentation.
MPEG-DASH: The Next Steps Towards Broad Adoption
Members of the DASH Industry Forum will discuss what concrete steps have been taken in order to foster fast adoption of the new industry standard for adaptive streaming over HTTP. The session will discuss the recently published DASH264 Implementation Guidelines that cover both live and on-demand services, MPEG-DASH profiles, audio and video codecs, closed-caption formatting and common encryption constants. The panel will consist of representatives from all relevant parts of the ecosystem and will address the practical matters and relevance of MPEG-DASH based service roll-outs for streaming and hybrid broadcast applications.
Moderator: Jan Nordmann, Director, Marketing and Business Development, Fraunhofer USA
Speaker: Kilroy Hughes, Senior Digital Media Architect, Windows Azure Media Services, Microsoft
Speaker: Andrew Popov, CTO, BuyDRM
Speaker: Tim McConnell, EVP Engineering, Solekai Systems
Speaker: Jeff Misenti, Chief Digital Officer, Fox News Digital
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