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This consumer research study, based on 1000 respondents, was fielded in late 2016 and explored attitudes and behaviors around watching video on mobile phones.

VR/360-degree video is an exciting evolution of traditional video content and both entertainment companies and traditional businesses are exploring its uses. While consumer adoption of VR video is still at the beginning of the adoption curve, many content owners and marketers are looking to this innovative medium to differentiate themselves in a crowded content market, to tell new, engaging stories, or deliver product/brand messaging. This market report looks at the technology, challenges, and approaches currently available to content creators with VR/360-degree video.

Delivering a great video experience requires content to be served as close to the end-user as possible. In this whitepaper, we illustrate how network operators can implement Open Caching nodes at the edge of their network, while adhering to specifications created by the Open Caching Working Group of the Streaming Video Alliance. These nodes can mitigate delivery latency and provide an improved viewer experience when hosted by the ISP and connected to the CDN/Content Provider nodes outside of the operator network, to create an Open Caching Network.

This paper explores the technology behind Multicast ABR and its potential to improve how video content is streamed over IP, meeting the network operator’s needs for a scalable way to deliver growing video traffic and end-users’ demands for the best possible streaming experience.

This document provides an explanation of the Common Media Application Format (CMAF) and the Alliance’s position on it within a streaming video workflow.

The evolution of content distribution models over the past decades has introduced a tremendous amount of flexibility for content processing and delivery. The availability of metadata, which provides information related to descriptive, business, and technical aspects of content, is needed to take advantage of advanced content streaming approaches. Commonly used metadata approaches primarily serve static distribution models. Additionally, there are a lack of solutions available that provide a consistent, user-friendly, and efficient approach to managing metadata. This document provides a starting point for understanding metadata usage and challenges and looks at organizations that have developed metadata-related standards.

As mobile networks evolved, became faster and offered more and more bandwidth, consumer habits also changed. Users began to adopt data-hungry activities like streaming video, streaming music, and cloud gaming. As the networks have continued to improve, so too has our expectations of the amount and quality of content delivered to our devices negating many of the benefits offered by the latest network and radio infrastructure.

The popularity of OTT services such as Netflix and YouTube are burgeoning and the demand for video content on mobile devices is rising exponentially placing massive demands on current 4G networks. Increased demand is just one aspect though. New formats like 360 degree video and XR in conjunction with higher definition including 4k and 8k are becoming common for videos viewed on connected devices, particularly those streaming content to big screen TV’s or head mounted VR units and as video quality rises, so does the need for faster connections to enjoy seamless streaming.

The ability to stream high quality video HD content requires download of less than 5 Mbps while an ultra-HD 4k video requires around 15 Mbps depending on the codec and compression. Both are easily supportable with the constraints of the current 4G specification however when combined with massive catalogs and insatiable demand, shared bandwidth on a radio network quickly becomes exhausted.

Even if the ability to stream at a high bandwidth is available, its not much use if the 4G radio network is not accessible. While operators continue to build out their 4G infrastructure we still experience far from ubiquitous coverage. When users lose their 4G connection the service is normally bumped down to 3G network which is typically 5 times slower making it impossible to initiate or continue to stream content. Clearly 4G cannot support the quality of service that most major content brands expect need to present to their consumers or the low latencies that XR and Cloud Gaming applications require.

5G has the potential to deliver a broad, disruptive user experience throughout the Media and Entertainment vertical, and will extend the metaphor of very simple content delivery to mobile devices that is prevalent in the market today, to an immersive, interactive and tactile shared experience for video entertainment, cloud gaming and extended reality (XR). With exceptional QoE combined with new business models that will include hyper-targeted advertising and enhanced QoE, 5G has the potential not only to bring content closer to the consumer, but also bring consumers closer together within the content ecosystem.

Extended Reality (XR) is becoming deeply ingrained in the consumer entertainment space and represents an interesting opportunity to provide immersive video experiences for the creators of premium entertainment and gaming content. This document looks at the XR use cases that are currently being deployed in both the entertainment and enterprise sectors and examines some of the technologies being leveraged today.

This document examines some of the differences and improvements between TCP and QUIC and provides an overview of HTTP/3. It examines the deployment model and summarizes some of the pros and cons that streaming providers need to consider before QUIC adoption.

Problem statement and functional requirements of an open caching solution deployed by service providers to be used by content providers and content delivery networks.

This document specifies requirements for Open Caching System (OCS) for Logging data to help track data acquisition and delivery of it to the end user. The information logging is critical for the Open Caching Nodes as well as the upstream CDN and the Content Provider (CP). Logging information helps OCS track key performance metrics such as, data acquisition, delivery success and failures, measuring of effective throughput, cache hits and for troubleshooting fault and performance degradation. The logging data provided to the CDN by the OCS is also used by CDNs for auditing, billing and SLA purposes. The information logging will also be used by Open Caching Nodes (making up an OCS) for ensuring its compliance of SLAs with CDNs and measuring and assuring
Quality of Experience (QoE) for an end user.

This document describes the process of provisioning a Logging Integration between a CDN and an ISP in an Open Caching solution. That is the process of configuring how delivery logs are transferred from ISP to CDN. The requirements for logging in Open Caching Nodes are described in the “Open Caching Logging Requirements Specification” document. This document defines extensions to the “Footprint and Capabilities” interface and to the “Service Metadata” interface, to allow provisioning a Logging Integration.

This includes the functional specification of open-caching service provisioning interfaces enabling a CDN and an SP to exchange information to enable the delegation of CDN content requests to the SP Open Caching system.

High-level functional specification of open caching request routing and the required interfaces to enable request routing to be performed from an upstream CDN to an open cache system.

This document describes the functional specification of the Open Caching Content Management interface and the functionality requirements from the SP Open Caching system. This document discusses the interface between the SP Open Caching Controller and the CDN. The interface between the SP OCC and the cache nodes (OCNs) is beyond the scope of this document.

This document outlines measurement metrics for open-caching. The focus of this document is to outline key performance indicators related to quality of service metrics at the open cache nodes that is responsible for delivering the streaming content.

This is the first part in a set of documents that specifies the motivational drivers, use cases, and standards for a configuration interface to facilitate interoperability within the content delivery network (CDN) and open caching ecosystems. This document set presents a layered architecture that extends the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) CDN Interconnect (CDNi) metadata model and adds publishing layer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to provide configuration management capabilities required by the CDN and open caching industries.

This is part two in a set of documents that specifies the motivational drivers, use cases, and standards for a configuration interface to facilitate interoperability within the content delivery network (CDN) and open caching ecosystem. This document presents the context and requirements for extending the Content Delivery Network Interconnection (CDNi) metadata model, as well as specific extensions that will fulfill those requirements. This document will provide all the necessary information for an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) memo describing the Streaming Video Alliance (SVA) metadata interface requirements beyond those stated in RFC-7337 (Content Distribution Network Interconnection Requirements), along with requested extensions to RFC-8006 (Content Delivery Network Interconnection Metadata).

This is part three in a set of documents that specifies the motivations, use cases, and standards for a configuration interface to facilitate interoperability within the content delivery network (CDN) and open caching ecosystems. In this document, the requirements for a configuration publishing layer are presented, along with APIs that facilitate the publishing of CDNi metadata objects within the CDN and open caching ecosystems.

The two most common streaming formats for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming – Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) – provide mechanisms for ads to be inserted into manifest files. However, there’s often a challenge to properly identify the unique ad asset(s) that are embedded in a manifest. This hampers efforts to ensure delivery and monitoring accuracy.

This document proposes a clear and interoperable signaling mechanism for the signaling of creative assets in DASH and HLS. It enables, for example, unique ad asset identifiers such as those from Ad-ID.org and/or unique in-house ad asset IDs to be captured in original or stitched manifest files.

In this document, a cross-functional working group committee reviews and responds to the HLS Content Steering Proposal 1.1b1 and the subsequent Redundant Stream Steering Proposal (RSS).

This document describes key network delivery metrics for streaming Internet video. The Streaming Video Alliance Quality of Experience (QoE) working group (WG) developed these metrics as a common language to describe effectiveness of network delivery. Although many more metrics could have been documented, these particular metrics represent the most common and important metrics according to the QoE WG group membership. It is expected that these metrics can be used across the streaming video ecosystem to provide guidance that can lead to enhancement of QoE.

The piracy of online video content is a significant issue for content owners and distributors. This document explains the technology of watermarking and how it can be employed, in various methods, to secure video against theft.

There are many different approaches to associating attributes to an IP address and many different attributes that can apply. There are also several different approaches to delivering that data. This document will focus on attributes that fall into three categories: Identity, Service, and Location. Identity can include a user’s name, the upstream service provider, an enterprise network, university, or department. Services can include attributes such as a W-Fi network, cable, wireless, infrastructure, and enterprise. Finally, location attributes can identify city, state, zip codes, country, region, or geocodes. A collection of attributes would form objects with their associated values, and these objects can be related to an individual IP address or a range of addresses to create an IP addressing object. These IP address objects can also be tied to an IP address object in a parent child relationship to provide as much detail as desired by the source. This document provides a JSON object model and schema to represent how those attributes can be tied to an IP address in a common format for controlling the access to streaming video using geo-location data for IPv4 and IPv6 addressing.

Note: access controls, privacy, and the management of privileged information (PII) will not be defined here and will be left to other efforts.

Advertisement insertion into OTT streams is a critical part of the overall user experience. Breakdowns in services or delivery can have a detrimental impact on viewer churn. To provide users with the best possible Quality of Experience (QoE), content publishers must take into account the advertising workflow with regards to quality, duration, delivery, and failure. The best practices presented in this paper, developed by a number of contributing companies in the Streaming Video Alliance’s Advertising Working Group, address a myriad of considerations for any OTT service provider that is considering the inclusion of advertising in their offering.

The ability to prevent piracy, take down illegal content, and act against illegal sources are key objectives of content protection. Meeting these objectives requires the use of a variety of technologies including watermarking, Digital Rights Management (DRM), fingerprinting, and cryptography. This document examines and discusses the streaming video system to provide best practices for protecting and securing streaming video content for both content providers and distributors to ensure content is being used as intended by those who it was intended.

This paper, originally published by SCTE ISBE, outlines a collaborative integration of manifest delivery, analytics, quality metrics, visual dashboard, and reporting methods while highlighting several demonstration use-cases. This proof-of-concept study will prove helpful for ad operations teams to enable a reliable Quality of Service (QoS) across streaming devices while validating advertiser’s investments.

This document identifies the vulnerability points inherent in streaming video players and proposes some of the industry best practices to ensure content is protected while not impeding viewer access or a high-quality viewing experience.