Akamai Explains the Economics of DASH and DASH-264

DASH was a hot topic at the recent Streaming Media West conference, and one of the most-attended sessions was on the subset called DASH-264. During the talk, Will Law, Akamai's principal architect for the media division, explained why DASH-264 was beneficial.

"The one positive driving people to a convergent solution is it's genuinely mutually beneficial," Law said. "It reduces the friction in your ecosystem when you're using something that is interoperable with other people in the delivery chain. So there's a natural incentive for people. It's the easier way to deploy DASH is to deploy something that a lot of other people are deploying. DASH-264 is a vehicle for doing that."

While there's no reason for a variety of DASH variations, Law explained that rallying support about DASH-264 makes sense, and is the role of the DASH-IF (DASH Industry Forum).

"I think you're going to see a lot of companies if they try to go out with their own version, there's not really an economic incentive in the long term, certainly, to try to do that," noted Law. "There's a strong incentive for people to coalesce around a format. It's the DASH-IF's job to evangelize that format, provide working examples, provide the test vectors, and certainly all three of those are being worked on currently. You also increase the likelihood by getting more content owners to work on DASH-264. DASH-264 is open: anyone in this room can join DASH-IF and start working on it. If it's important to your business, you should think about doing that."

For more on DASH-264's future, watch the full panel discussion below.

ROUND TABLE: Making DASH Workable, The DASH-264 Recommendation

To make the DASH standard useful in the real world, a number of key industry players are defining a practical subset of the standard to serve as a baseline for device implementations. In this session, attendees learn what feature capabilities are available with DASH (multi-bitrate, multi-language, multi-channel, common encryption, trick modes) and how these are being defined and presented as a set of conformance and interoperability tests. If you need to ensure that DASH will work with your encoder, CDN, playback device or website, this is the session for you.

Moderator: Michael Luby, VP Technology, Qualcomm
Speaker: Will Law, Principal Architect, Media Division, Akamai Technologies
Speaker: Michael Stattmann, Managing Director, CastLabs
Speaker: Andrew Popov, CTO, BuyDRM
Speaker: Jan Nordmann, Director, Marketing and Business Development, Fraunhofer USA

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