The State of MPEG-DASH Deployment

People have been recently discussing some of the points raised by this article at Streaming Media Website, it’s worth a read. A few of the points from the article worth noting;

LTE Broadcast and Pay TV.

• With LTE Broadcast the device can switch on the fly from a unicast DASH session to a multicast DASH session. 
• This broadcast/multicast DASH session only has one variant stream. 
• On congested cells it provides a mechanism to deliver content to more users. 
• Could CC leverage this ability in some way?

• Netflix a bit like YouTube don’t use the DASH standardised MPD (Media Presentation Description) to detail all available variants, which means they aren’t really DASH, in my opinion. They use one the file formats specified in Dash, a variant of MP4 file format. This is a trend we have seen content providers follow, choosing parts of the standard they like and not others. 
• Netflix and YouTube are using CENC (Common Encryption) standard as supported by DASH to DRM their content. This provides the ability to switch to different DRM providers and not to be tied to one specific version. 
• HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV) TV sets are reported to becoming available to consumers. The latest version of the HbbTV specification supports DASH only formatted content for DRM protected content.

Further Reading
Multicast-broadcast single-frequency network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast-broadcast_single-frequency_network




Ericsson LTE Broadcast http://www.ericsson.com/ourportfolio/telecom-operators/lte-broadcast

CENC http://docs.unified-streaming.com/documentation/protect/common-encryption.html

HbbTV https://www.hbbtv.org/