On
March 31, the DASH Industry Forum will release its final guidelines for the
MPEG-DASH standard (now dubbed DASH-264). It is a culmination of several years
of effort to unify the industry around a single standard for adaptive bit rate
streaming: i.e., the practice of dynamically adjusting the video quality of
streamed content to mobile devices to account for bandwidth constraints.
DASH
aims to unify three disparate adaptive bit rate technologies (Microsoft's
Smooth Streaming, Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming and Apple's HTTP Live
Streaming or HLS) into a single standard to further drive adoption of streaming
video. Yet as of now, only Microsoft and Adobe have endorsed the standard. While
Apple has contributed some technology to the DASH standard, it has yet to
endorse the final implementation.
This,
needless to say, is a major blow.
While
Apple's mobile dominance has come under increasing pressure from Android and a
resurgent Microsoft, it still dominates the tablet market and will likely
maintain a preeminent position for several years yet. A study from video
monetization firm FreeWheel indicated that Apple's iOS accounted for 60 percent of mobile
video views (Android trailed with 32 percent). Any streaming video standard
that does not incorporate Apple is leaving an unacceptably huge swath of the
market untouched.
Apple's
reluctance to endorse DASH hasn't stopped encoder manufacturers from rallying
around the standard, or hailing its inevitability, but it has dimmed
some of the optimism that the standard would deliver on its promise of
simplifying an operator's life.
Indeed,
at CES 2013 enthusiasm for DASH was far more muted than it was at NAB just
several months earlier. Rather than an inevitable convergence of disparate
standards, some industry players believe that DASH and Apple's HLS may
co-exist. This will naturally frustrate equipment and chip makers, who will
have to build in support for both standards. It will frustrate content creators
and distributors to, as they grapple with multiple formats.
It also
raises questions about how Apple uses its dominant market share position. As
Michael Vitale observed, the late Steve Jobs relentlessly bashed
Adobe for the proprietary nature of Flash while patting himself on the back for
embracing open web standards such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Yet by
withholding support for DASH in favor of the proprietary HLS, Apple is
mirroring the same strategy it complained to Adobe about.
Apple
hypocrisy aside, even a slower trot to DASH is unlikely to curb the momentum
for multi-screen video delivery. Much like the mobile ecosystem market itself,
it's just likely to be more fragmented than many would like.
