Video: What Is the Role of Packaging in Streaming Delivery?

Learn more about CMAF and stream packaging at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete panel, T104. The Cutting Edge of Packing Strategies, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

David Sayed: Packaging. If you think about, you have a piece of media content that you need to deliver. I would say for the past--it must be 10 years or so now-- that we've actually been doing what's called adaptive bitrate streaming over the Internet. And the way that works is you actually take your media file, you encapsulate it in one of several different formats, and this is where one of the topics that Will brought up earlier comes in. And you essentially create chunks of these, of the media fragments, that you can then deliver over the public Internet. So, it's just HTTP traffic, and then your device is able to read those chunks, and put the video file back to, the media file back together again, as well as to switch up and down to different resolutions and bitrates depending on the quality of the network connection. So, part of the secret sauce that makes all that happen is having a packaging format that can traverse the Internet, and that can be played back or interpreted by the appropriate devices.

Will Law: On a high level with packaging, a lot of us, we buy an encoding box, and we put video on the one end, and segments and text files come out the other end. And people call that packaging. I think we should decouple encoding or transcoding from packaging. And in many, many more sophisticated workflows they are indeed highly decoupled. An encoder is going to reduce, create the actual audio and video content, but it may be a continuous stream of content with key frames or SCTE markers inserted into it. That's going to go into the packaging solution, which is then going to potentially physically cut it, and at the same time, prepare the presentation format, which would be HLS or DASH, that describes the availability of this content. And packaging systems can operate statically in general, meaning you prepare the content well ahead of time before it's requested; or, dynamically, which is you do it just in time when the content's requested.

Video: Is CMAF the One Packaging Format to Rule Them All?

Microsoft's David Sayed, Imagine Communications' David Heppe, and Akamai's Will Law discuss CMAF and the future of packaging formats in this clip from their panel at Streaming Media East 2019.

29 Jul 2019