Technical Groups
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SVTA Technical Groups
The SVTA Technical groups, from working groups to study groups, represent functional areas of the streaming workflow in which technical challenges are addressed by member companies and employees of the SVTA member companies.
Working Groups
Working Groups
These are functional groups within the Alliance and often address one or more technical challenges. They are chaired by two member companies.
Sub Groups
Sub-groups represent an idea within a working group that seems bigger than just a project (i.e., more than one challenge to address) but aren’t quite robust enough to warrant a separate working group. They usually have one chair.
Study Groups
Study groups are formed to investigate a particularly interesting aspect of the streaming video space (i.e., VR, AI, ML). That aspect is often too young of a technology to formalize specific responses such as a best practice, specification, or guideline.
Leadership
Technical Groups are lead by Chairs (one, two, or three people working to manage the group’s activities and direction) and Ambassadors (one person who helps evangelize the group’s technology to the industry).
Study Groups
Topic Areas
Many of the working groups, sub groups, and study groups pursue projects related to the technical challenges in a variety of different topical areas.
Analytics
Understanding how people consume online video resides at the heart of delivering streaming services. From server-side logs to real-user measurement, analytics provides the insight into content consumption that can help shape Quality of Service and Quality of Experience. Failing to identify and capture needed metrics can result in a less than stellar end-user experience. What’s more, identifying the best way to collect, aggregate, and visualize that data needed to make sense of the end-to-end value chain.
Architecture
The implementation method of a streaming video architecture significantly impacts how well it can meet the demands of growing audiences and the proliferation of connected devices. Failing to take into account such elements as scalability and redundancy can undermine the audience’s quality of experience.
Content
Content is at the heart of the online video industry. But owners and distributors are faced with constant challenges regarding the optimization of that content for delivery and consumption to a multitude of different devices.
Delivery
Getting content from storage to client takes more than just a server and some bandwidth. It requires specialized software and infrastructure to optimally deliver the right content, to the right device, at the right time.
Interoperability
Many components in the streaming video value chain don’t speak natively to one another. Yes, many use web-based protocols enabling them to easily publish data, but most of them were built as stand-alone entities. That kind of disconnection makes it inherently difficult to piece together an end-to-end streaming video workflow. That can result in solutions that are difficult to upgrade, maintain, and operate.
Management
Just as people consume more online video content, so too do video libraries increase in size and scope. Just a few years ago, big video libraries were measured in Terabytes. Now it’s hundreds of Terabytes and, for the really large providers, even Petabytes. As video libraries swell in size, providers need to have a strategy by which to manage video assets and, more importantly, the metadata associated with them. Failing to have a good management strategy can result in poor end-user experiences (as users wade through pages and pages of titles online).
Playback
Delivering a great video experience to an online audience is critical for content success. A poor playback experience can ruin even good content! But tracking what’s happening with a player (and what the consumer is actually seeing) is difficult and challenging. Not only does the player need specialized code to capture key events (like startup time and buffering events), but the content owner or distributor needs server-side infrastructure to crunch and visualize the data.
Security
Protecting content is a critical part of delivering it. Content owners and distributors need to protect their online video from theft which can involve a host of different technologies across a myriad of devices. Only just one type of security isn’t enough. In order to fully protect video assets, a multi-layered approach must be used.