The Streaming Video Alliance has undergone a rebrand to the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) as the organization aims to showcase the work of its technology groups.

The Alliance aims to solve the technical challenges of streaming video and ensure online video continues to flourish.

Since its launch in 2014, the SVTA has grown to include over 100 member companies across the globe, seven Technical Groups, and has published 30 documents to date, which include technical specifications, best practices, guidelines, and tech briefs on key industry trends.

“Updating the name of the Alliance is a key step in our strategy to clearly communicate to our audiences that all of our work focuses on addressing technical challenges throughout the streaming workflow,” said Jason Thibeault, executive director at the Streaming Video Technology Alliance.

“Our original mission of providing a forum for the industry to collaborate on technical solutions for delivering high-quality streaming video at scale remains the same, and now our brand clearly supports that focus.”

In a blog post, Thibeualt added that the new brand “clearly supports” the story that the Alliance wants to convey: that is a technical association focusing solely on technical challenges.

“It provides a new gravitas to our working groups,” he added. “What’s more, this slight tweak also speaks to those who get involved with the organization. The people sent by our member companies are focused on technology as well. They may be product managers or architects or devops or software engineers, but they are, at their core, highly technical people.”

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope.

FREMONT, Calif.—As Streaming Video Alliance began its Q2 2022 member meeting on May 9, the group announced the publication of the eXtended Reality Brief, a new document produced by the VR Study Working Group and welcomed new members ARK Multicasting, Ceeblue, SiriusXM Radio, The Football Association Premier League, and WarnerMedia to the association. 

The virtual event will span four days, May 9 to 12, and features presentations on important industry topics, as well as Working Group breakout sessions.

“There’s a lot of great progress happening inside the Alliance, as evidenced by new technical documents and a growing membership base. We’re excited to welcome ARK Multicasting, Ceeblue, SiriusXM Radio, The Football Association Premier League, and WarnerMedia as our newest members,” said Jason Thibeault, executive director at the Streaming Video Alliance. “We’re back in cyberspace for this week’s meetings with an excellent line up planned for our members, and we’re looking forward to the many discussions and collaborations that will take place.”

In an effort to analyze eXtended Reality (XR), the SVA’s VR Study Group has been examining how this technology is currently being deployed. XR is deeply ingrained in the consumer entertainment space, and in studying its current uses an opportunity has arisen for companies to provide immersive video experiences for the creators of premium entertainment and gaming content, the group said. 

In the newly released Brief on XR, the VR Study Group looks at how technology around XR is being leveraged today and discusses a number of use cases. The SVA’s eXtended Reality Brief is available here. 

Additional information is also available at a recent blog post that provides an overview of “The State of XR Video Experiences.”

DENVER—Disney Streaming and Lumen Technologies have announced that they are leading an effort to produce standardized CDN configuration metadata and application programming interfaces (APIs) for the streaming video industry. 

The multi-year effort is being done through the Streaming Video Alliance (SVA), a consortium of 100+ businesses in the video industry that work together to improve the streaming experience for consumers.

Standardized metadata will allow content providers to use a common metadata model and a single API to publish CDN configurations to vendors.

Without this standardization, organizations must separately model and publish metadata within each CDN vendor’s proprietary API or management portal. For large organizations with multiple brands, proprietary APIs are inefficient, error-prone, and costly – issues that negatively affect the customer experience, the companies said.

With contributions and leadership from Disney Streaming and Lumen, the SVA recently published the first version of the Configuration Interface Specifications – the technical specifications document that will serve as the streaming industry’s guide for standardization. Version two is underway, and work is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

“We believe all streaming providers will benefit from standardization across commercial CDN providers and the Open Cache industry, which is why we’ve led the charge, working alongside companies like Lumen, on evangelizing this important work,” said Michael Fay, vice president, software engineering, Disney Streaming. “Hundreds of millions of subscribers already engage with Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+, and as demand increases for our direct-to-consumer platforms, we believe standardization will be a key driver in maintaining our reputation in delivering a high-quality viewing experience for subscribers at scale.”

“Lumen operates one of the largest CDNs in the world via the Lumen Edge Platform, which provides unmatched performance and speed for latency-sensitive, data-intensive applications and content,” said Pierre-louis Theron, Lumen vice president of product management for content delivery services. “Developing standards that reduce complexity for our media customers is key to our shared success, now and in the future. We will continue to contribute significant work and insight to the standardization effort, relying on the deep expertise we have gained from years of experience building and operating our own CDN.”

“Commercial CDNs and open caching systems have many common requirements when it comes to defining and publishing configuration metadata,” said Glenn Goldstein, Lumen CDN product strategist and lead editor of the SVA’s Configuration Interface Specifications. “We knew we could help the industry leverage those commonalities while still helping every company achieve its own interests. We started by agreeing upon a set of drivers that benefited all industry participants. These included standardizing feature definitions, providing for DevOps-friendly automation, and allowing technology vendors to differentiate.”

FREMONT, Calif.—The Streaming Video Alliance (the SVA) has released new technical specification documents  from the Open Caching Working Group and Networking and Transport Working Group. 

The Configuration Interface, produced by the Open Caching Working Group, is a series of three documents that specifies the motivational drivers, use cases, and standards for a configuration interface to facilitate interoperability within the content delivery network (CDN) and Open Caching ecosystems. 

The 5G and the Edge Cloud for Streaming Video document provides an outline of 5G technologies; the types of use cases and enhanced consumer experiences it will support; and the potential benefits for content owners, ecosystem vendors, network operators, and viewers.

“Developing and introducing new public specifications is one of the SVA’s top priorities and represents some of the most important work produced by our members,” said Jason Thibeault, executive director at the Streaming Video Alliance. “I want to recognize and thank our members from the Open Caching Working Group and Networking and Transport Working Group for their commitment to bringing their respective projects full circle.”

The new documents include: 

Open Caching Configuration Interface: Part 1 Overview and Architecture

This document presents the motivational drivers for an industry standard CDN Configuration Interface; illustrates relationships between the set of specifications, capabilities, APIs, and entities that use and implement these standards; and places this set of specifications in context of other SVA Open Caching documents and IETF CDNi RFCs. To get more information and download the document visit here

Open Caching Configuration Interface: Part 2 Extensions to CDNi Metadata Object Model

The second document in this series covers the context and requirements for extending the Content Delivery Network Interconnection (CDNi) metadata model, as well as specific extensions that will fulfill those requirements. This document also serves as the basis for an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft describing the configuration metadata model requirements beyond those stated in RFC-7337 (Content Distribution Network Interconnection Requirements), along with requested extensions to RFC-8006 (Content Delivery Network Interconnection Metadata) and RFC-8008 (Footprint and Capabilities Semantics).   To get more information and download the document visit here

Open Caching Configuration Interface: Part 3 Publishing Layer APIs

The third document in this series covers the requirements for a configuration publishing layer, along with APIs that facilitate the publishing of CDNi metadata objects within the CDN and open caching ecosystems. To get more information and download the document visit here

5G and the Edge Cloud for Streaming Video

In the media and entertainment sector, 5G offers the promise of greater consumer reach and new, more immersive services. Increasingly, content owners are looking toward 5G as a source of new revenue, consumer reach, and enhanced QoE for their streaming services. This document provides a brief outline of 5G technologies; the types of use cases and enhanced consumer experiences it will support; and the potential benefits for content owners, ecosystem vendors, network operators, and viewers. To get more information and download the document visit here

For more information on the SVA, the Working Groups, or to inquire about becoming a member, visit www.streamingvideoalliance.org.

FREMONT, Calif.—The Streaming Video Alliance has announced the recipients of its 2022 Membership Grant Program, which sponsors select, small companies meeting specific financial requirements with a one-year Principal membership. 

The initiative enables smaller companies like startups to contribute to and benefit from the Alliance’s mission of deeper industry collaboration across the video streaming ecosystem while also benefits existing members and the industry at large by accelerating advancements and bringing in new ideas from startups on the cutting edge of streaming video innovation, the group said. 

“We’re thrilled to welcome our new and returning Grant members and look forward to their participation and contributions this year, starting with the Q1 member meeting,” said Jason Thibeault, executive director at the Streaming Video Alliance, a global technical association addressing critical challenges in streaming video. “We’re also excited to share that for the second year in a row, the Alliance has met its commitment to award at least half of the membership grants to businesses led by underrepresented groups.”

The Alliance board of directors chose the following three companies as the 2022 grant recipients: 

• Blockcast, a satellite CDN that has developed a multicast proxy which continuously pre-caches personalized content, and decreases network congestion even over the most constrained links such as inflight connectivity, rural and remote networks, oil rigs, etc.
• Netskrt Systems, which provides an edge content delivery network (eCDN) solution. The Netskrt eCDN brings the expanding universe of direct-to-consumer streaming internet video to previously unserved locations, notably rail and air transportation. 
• picoNETS is a deep edge CDN improvising last-mile content delivery. With its ultra-Low Latency CDN, picoNETS delivers a buffer-free experience for 4K, 8K, AR, VR, and other bandwidth-demanding metaverse content. It's fully optimized for 5G and edge computing.

2021 Grant Recipient Members Datazoom, Didja, Touchstream, and allt will continue into 2022 as Grant members. A special committee chartered by the board selected these 2021 recipients to receive another membership grant based on their contributions.

Members of the Alliance include companies from across the streaming video ecosystem such as network operators, technology providers, service providers, and content owners. Current members are: Adobe, AERQ, Agile Content, Alibaba, allt, Amazon, ATEME, Blockcast, Brightcove, Broadpeak, CBC, Charter Communications, Cisco Systems, Citrix, Comcast, CommScope, Compira Labs, Conviva, Datazoom, Deutsche Telekom, DidjaTV, Disney Streaming, Dolby, Eluvio, Equus Compute Solutions, Ericsson, EXFO, Fastly, Friend MTS, Globo, Harmonic, Hughes Satellite Systems, INKA Entworks, Intel, InterDigital, Intelsat, Interra Systems, Irdeto, Liberty Global, Limelight Networks, Lumen Technologies, Mainstreaming, Nagra, NCTA, Netskrt, Neustar, Nice People at Work, NS1, NTT, Optus, Orange, Panasonic Avionics, Penthera, picoNETS, Plex, Qwilt, ServiceNow, Siden, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Sky, SSIMWAVE, ST Engineering iDirect, Stackpath, Streaming Global, Synamedia, Telefonica, Telekom Malaysia, Telestream, Thales, THEO, Touchstream, Unified Streaming, Varnish Software, Vecima Networks, Velocix, Verizon, ViacomCBS, Viasat Inc., and Western Digital Corp.

TEL AVIV, Israel—TAG Video Systems is joining the Streaming Video Alliance, the company has announced.

The Streaming Video Alliance is a global industry forum of companies from the online video ecosystem that work to develop best practices to create high quality video experiences. To date, it has more than 85 member companies.

“TAG is delighted to join the founders of the Streaming Video Alliance along with the brightest minds in the video value chain to address challenges that inherently arise with emerging technologies,” said Tomer Schechter, TAG CTO. “The Alliance offers an incredible opportunity to collaborate with fellow members and utilize our experience to solve key issues facing network operators, service providers, content owners and technology companies.”

TAG Video is a provider of software-based integrated IP multiviewing, probing and monitoring systems.

For more information, visit www.tagvs.com.  

NEW YORK—Google has joined the Streaming Video Alliance, which this week held a face-to-face meeting with other alliance members in Manhattan.

"A lot has happened in the four years since the alliance was founded. New industry technologies have been introduced and adopted, new alliance members have joined our ranks, such as AWS and Google, and the consumer demand for and consumption of streaming video continues to soar," said Jason Thibeault, executive director of the alliance.

[Read: Amazon Web Services Joins Streaming Video Alliance]

The meeting, held May 10 at principal member Viacom’s headquarters in Times Square, included a keynote from Viacom Senior Director of Technology Convergence and Director of Emerging Streaming Technology Alec Hendry.

Other highlights included an HEVC licensing symposium, a member-led session on conquering the challenge of massive-scaled live synchronized events and a welcome to new alliance members Google and Videastream.

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services is the latest company to join the Streaming Video Alliance.

The announcement coincides with the third birthday of the Alliance, an industry forum composed of leading companies from the online video ecosystem.

Other members of the Alliance include Cisco Systems, Dolby, IBM, Limelight Networks, Sky and Viacom.

"The new dynamics of OTT are radically disrupting the media landscape across the globe, and we need to remember that the OTT market and online video are still very young when compared with television. The industry collaboration and unification that the Alliance provides its members is key to solving some of the industry's biggest obstacles in the proliferation of OTT TV viewing," said Jason Thibeault, executive =director of the Streaming Video Alliance. 

"From the very beginning of the Alliance, OTT companies have been part of the conversation, and we're excited to continue expanding the OTT expertise and participation inside of the Alliance."

This story originally appeared on TVT's sister publication TVB Europe.