In an effort that shows the growing importance of streaming technologies for broadcasters and the need to break down technical silos between streaming and broadcast, the Streaming Video Technology Alliance and UHD Forum are pushing forward with plans to merge.
"At an annual UHDF breakfast on Saturday at IBC, we revealed the plan to merge UHDF into SVTA which was very positively received by the UHDF audience, an audience that has historically been very broadcast heavy,” reported Jason Thibeault, CEO at SVTA in a blog post. “But as you also probably know, many broadcasters have already embraced streaming (or `digital distribution’ as they like to call it) and there are even national efforts, such as in the U.K., to mandate that all video be delivered via streaming. Despite the rumblings of `us’ (broadcasters) versus `them’ (streamers), there is a natural synergy that has been forming between the two groups for years, simmering under the surface and quietly reshaping how our collective industry, video content, has been evolving. Of course, there will always be bumps in the road and obstacles to overcome, but, in the end, there is only content distribution regardless of how that content gets to the viewer.”
Thibeault reported that “the transaction isn’t done but our two boards have agreed to do this and we already have a set of terms that are pretty much finalized. We expect things to move forward quickly but this will definitely happen by the end of the year. Fingers crossed then, that this decision continues, and maybe even intensifies, the slow merging of broadcast and streaming into a single industry, a single workflow, and a single mission—to deliver the best possible video experience to viewers…on whatever device they want to watch, wherever they are.
"Much as when DASH-IF joined the SVTA, there is a lot of work ahead of us to connect the UHDF activities into the larger SVTA mission of solving the technical challenges of securely streaming high-quality video at scale," he also explained. "Interoperability has long plagued our industry and is something that we, at the SVTA, are also seeking to improve. With the UHDF guidelines now part of the SVTA, we can leverage the larger SVTA member pool (which has many companies that live in both the broadcast and streaming world but were not members of the UHDF) to bring more technical expertise and insight to solving new technical challenges of content quality and production. We see the UHDF collaborating with other Working Groups in an effort to improve that interoperability and reduce the siloing which has been hurting our industry the past decades."
