Industry Leaders Join Forces to Form Streaming Video Alliance
In an effort to develop universal standards and best practices for high-scale Internet video services, 17 content companies, service providers and technology vendors have gathered to create the Streaming Video Alliance. Together, these companies hope to improve the online video experience. SVA will initially focus on open architecture, quality of experience, and interoperability. Formation of the group comes as net neutrality continues its path as a complex and controversial issue.
The Streaming Video Alliance has three tiers of membership: sponsor/founding member ($25,000 annually); full member ($12,500); and supporting member ($5,500).
The group will focus on three initial areas: open architecture, to define specifications for network and cloud-based streaming and caching infrastructure; quality of experience, to create a common approach to defining, measuring, optimizing and reporting quality of the video streaming; and interoperability, to create standards for streaming video.
The group consists of the following companies: Alcatel-Lucent, Charter Communications, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Epix, Fox Networks Group, Korea Telecom, Level 3 Communications, Liberty Global, Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Qwilt, Telecom Italia, Telstra, Ustream, Wowza Media Systems and Yahoo.
Interestingly, SVA was founded without Netflix or YouTube, which are currently the greatest sources of Internet bandwidth usage, and have both invested heavily in their own distribution infrastructures.
Founding members of the Streaming Video Alliance (streamingvideoalliance.org) will meet together at least twice per year in person, and committees will have regular calls and meetings to create specs. The SVA is not a standards body, Rayburn said; rather, it plans to propose technical specs to relevant standards bodies.
See the full story here: http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/streaming-video-alliance-trade-group-launches-without-netflix-or-youtube-1201356366/
and here: http://www.etcentric.org/industry-leaders-join-forces-to-form-streaming-video-alliance/