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Why Did Agora Join the Streaming Video Technology Alliance?
Agora is a relatively new member of the SVTA, joining in the fall of 2023. We’re one of a handful of members who solely focus on ultra-low latent, interactive, WebRTC-based streaming use cases. In April of 2024 we celebrated our 10-year anniversary, and up until the last couple of years, our primary use cases have not included Media & Entertainment. Due to changing consumer habits, new laws, and the emergence of many new streaming platforms, companies are looking for new revenue streams and trying out different live formats. Some of those new revenue streams and live formats require WebRTC-based or like solutions where there is minimal workflow standardization.
Joining the SVTA has allowed us to have a consistent line of communication with our peers and clients in the industry, validate the challenges that we’re seeing in the marketplace, and collaborate with the streaming industry’s best to resolve challenges, set standards, and improve our own solutions.
What Do You Believe is the Biggest Technical Challenge Facing the Streaming Video Industry the SVTA Can Help Address?
Specific to ultra-low latency, there have been two big challenges to successfully delivering sub-400 millisecond live streams – scaling capacity without sacrificing quality and mirroring traditional workflow functionality of traditional live streams. The scaling capacity challenge has largely been resolved. However, the workflow functionality challenge still remains. Digital rights management, ad integration, graphics overlay, and smart TV OS integration are challenging to integrate into an ultra-low latent stream. As we see more of an appetite from content owners to try out alternative live streaming models (think ESPN’s recent Simpsons takeover of Monday Night Football and upcoming Dunk the Halls NBA game, Disney’s NFL game in London via the Toy Story universe, and live streams via legal sports books apps encouraging micro-bets), working to find repeatable solutions for these workflow issues will be key. If consumers adopt these alternative live streaming models and they help content owners drive more profitable revenue, the market will need repeatable solutions for these challenges. Thankfully, organizations like the SVTA exist to help validate potential changes to workflows and tech stacks, and to amplify solutions.
How Does an Organization Like the SVTA Bring Value to the Industry?
The SVTA enables communication amongst peers, giving us a platform to discuss challenges and what’s working/not working in the industry. Having the brightest minds in our industry come together and help solve tough challenges in our space allows us all to push forward more quickly and deliver better experiences for the consumer.

Andrew Thompson
VP, GTM
About
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Agora is a pioneer and global leader in Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), providing developers with simple, flexible, and powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs, to embed real-time voice, video, interactive live-streaming, chat, whiteboard, and artificial intelligence capabilities into their applications.