Industry players to promote new adaptive streaming standard

A diverse group of technology leaders announced the creation of the DASH Promoters Group, a new organisation dedicated to driving the broad adoption of MPEG's DASH (dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP) standard, which was ratified in November 2011. Microsoft, Netflix and Qualcomm are the founding members. Other companies rounding out the membership at the time of this announcement include Adobe, AEG Digital Media, Akamai, BuyDRM, Digital Rapids, Digital TV Labs, Dolby, EBU-UER, Elemental, Envivio, Ericsson, Harmonic, Intertrust, NDS, Packet Ship, Path1, RGB Networks, Samsung, Thomson, University of Klagenfurt and ZiXi. DASH is designed to address the dramatic growth of internet video by defining a universal delivery format, which provides end users with the best possible video experience and dynamically adapts to changing network conditions as video streams to their devices. With the formation of the Promoters Group and significant interest from a variety of companies, commercial DASH products are expected this year and the current members expect their ranks to swell. As part of their strategy to accelerate DASH adoption, the Promoters Group will demonstrate DASH streaming video at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Qualcomm's exhibit. In addition to promoting broad adoption of DASH, the Promoters Group will focus on aligning ongoing DASH standards development, promoting the use of common profiles across industry organisations, and facilitating interoperability tests and plug-fests to demonstrate the usability and completeness of the DASH standard. The DASH Promoters Group is also working toward recommended deployment configurations for DASH, informally called DASH-264. This would enable a minimum set of DASH requirements for the industry and help enable further commercialisation of mobile devices that support it.