Players and Playback

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Players and Playback

Overview

It’s the end of the line for the streaming video workflow. It’s where all the efforts in delivery tuning, encoding optimization, and other content transformations come to a head. But there are innumerable technology challenges once it leaves the network and hits the viewer’s screen. These challenges may deal with the player itself, as a piece of software on a device, or with the playback experience: how users navigate, manipulate, and consume content. And although there is plenty of measurement happening at the player, there is little consistency across multiple playback experiences on a myriad of devices. In this study group, participating members and selected outside parties will seek to document those challenges and assess the technology player landscape in an effort to provide consistency to the industry. It is from this documentation and analysis that best practices, guidelines, and even specifications will arise to provide possible solutions.

Objectives

The Streaming Video Technology Alliance Player and Playback Study Group has the following objectives. First, to understand the technical challenges across the player and device ecosystem. Second, to document those challenges and identify possible projects for best practices, guidelines, and specifications.

Chairs

Current Projects

Proofs of Concept

This group has not initiated or completed any proofs of concept.

Presentations

Below are presentations delivered during working group sessions. Click on the presentation name to open it (many files are for members only and will require authentication) and a presenter name to view their profile. Note: if a presenter’s profile is not public, it will redirect to their LinkedIn page.

Documents

Published

Draft

Note that to download draft documents, you must be an employee of an active member company with an ARO account. If you are part of a member company and don’t yet have an ARO account, you can request one here.

Blog Posts

Investigating Approaches to Multi-CDN Delivery

In this project, the SVTA Players and Playback group will look at the different approaches to multi-CDN delivery and provide an analysis to help streaming platforms select the best option for their specific business requirements. In addition, the group will propose a client-side solution using a JavaScript load balancer and SDK compatibility layer. This solution may encompass different heuristics for CDN selection, and one of our goals is to study the impact of client-side CDN switching on a client’s rate-adaptation algorithm.

Read the blog post

Read all the Players and Playback blogs