Open Call For dash.js OSS Funding Support

Dear streaming industry, SVTA members, DASH-IF, and dash.js community,

As we are about to celebrate a season of gratitude, let’s take a moment to appreciate one of the most transformative innovations in streaming: dash.js. For over 12 years, this open-source reference player has powered interoperability, innovation, and growth across our industry. Today, we face a critical moment, and we need your help to keep this success story alive.

Why dash.js matters

In 2012, the idea of an open source and platform agnostic reference player for DASH was born by Will Law from Akamai. Will acted as development lead for several years and still supervises and supports the project wholeheartedly.

In 2013, dash.js v1.0.0 was released. In 2025, the player is now 12 years full of innovation, commitments, and support. Three lead developers after Will Law created a sustainable baseline for long-term success: Dan Sparacio, Jesus Oliva, and Daniel Silhavy. dash.js has been the common innovation platform for media streaming for more than a decade. And what a success story it has been! dash.js is the official reference player by the DASH Industry Forum for playback of MPEG-DASH content as defined in Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) – ISO/IEC 23009 Part 1: Media presentation description and segment formats and the DASH-IF Interoperability guidelines.

Today, the player is maintained by Fraunhofer FOKUS, but it is a community-driven development. You can access the open-source project and the latest version, 5.1.0, on Github https://github.com/Dash-Industry-Forum/dash.js/. The player is written in JavaScript and uses the W3C Media Source Extensions (MSE) and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). By this design, it works on all MSE and EME based platforms including Desktop browsers, smartphones, SmartTVs, Set-Top Boxes. The player includes various features including flexible ABR logic, multiperiod, DRM support, MPD patching, Gap handling, CMCD, CMAF low latency support, support for various subtitle formats (TTML, IMSC1, WebVTT), L3D DASH and many more.

The player implements the latest features from DASH-IF IOP guidelines and ISO/IEC specification. It is used by other organizations in their reference implementations, including CTA-WAVE, DVB-I, HbbTV and 5G-MAG. It is also used in production, for instance by BBC, Deutsche Telekom, Orange. Here are some numbers from GitHub and NPM to show the significance:

• 60 releases,
• > 5.500 stars,
• 242 watchers,
• > 1.700 forks,
• 197 contributors,
• 1.133.000 downloads on NPM in October 2025 a 420% increase compared to October 2024.
• The project has 1978 slack members and 1192 on Google Groups. The project is exceptionally well maintained and all details can be found here:

Here are some other resources regarding the dash.js project:

• GitHub project: https://github.com/Dash-Industry-Forum/dash.js
• GitHub project boards: https://github.com/Dash-Industry-Forum/dash.js/projects?query=is%3Aopen
• Reference client: https://reference.dashif.org/dash.js/nightly/samples/dash-if-reference-player/index.html
• Samples: https://reference.dashif.org/dash.js/nightly/samples/index.html
• Documentation: https://dashif.org/dash.js/
• API documentation: https://cdn.dashjs.org/latest/jsdoc/module-MediaPlayer.html
• Slack Channel: https://dashif-slack.azurewebsites.net/
• Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/g/dashjs
• How to contribute: https://dashif.org/dash.js/pages/developers/how-to-contribute.html

At the end, this platform was one of the key enablers to migrate mainstream TV and content distribution from dedicated distributions system on dedicated clients to an open distribution platform and to any device that supports a browser and HTML-5, resulting in ultimate reach.

Here is the challenge

Some may view dash.js as a given … but there are more challenges that you may imagine considering the impact of the project on the society.

Maintaining a large and well adopted open-source project such as dash.js comes with various tasks and responsibilities. This ranges from GitHub general maintenance efforts such as user management, CI/CD and triaging incoming issues to reviewing large pull requests by the community and the implementation of new major features. The resulting code complexity as well as the required knowledge of the underlying specifications and guidelines add to the required effort.

Since its inception, dash.js development has received funding and backing from the DASH Industry Forum, which continued after merging with the Streaming Video Tech Alliance (SVTA). Unfortunately, due to limited budgets and rising costs for the SDOs, funding for the dash.js project has declined in recent years.

This Holiday season, let’s give back.

With the dash.js contract converting to month-to-month, and while SVTA actively works on a long-term solution to funding, we believe it essential to bring this issue to the wider industry and, especially, those companies that are using the technology in their production workflows. We see clear responsibilities for the community and the industry to step in and make sure that the project can be continued and is actively maintained.

How you can help:

• Provide funding or sponsorship for ongoing maintenance and development.
• Contribute engineering resources or expertise.
• Spread the word within your organization and industry.

For those companies that can contribute, whether it’s through financial support or engineering resources, we will acknowledge them on a new dash.js OSS project page on the SVTA website: https://www.svta.org/open-source-project/dash-js/

If you or your company are relying on dash.js, and/or understand the commercial value of the project in the past and for the future, and want to ensure the project maintenance and support continues, this is the time to step up.

Please reach out to the DASH-IF WG chair, Thomas Stockhammer, or the SVTA CEO, Jason Thibeault, to discuss how you can help. If you don’t have a direct means to reach them, you can find a “sponsorship inquiry form” on the dash.js OSS project page.

Together, let’s keep dash.js alive and strong for the next decade of innovation.