Open Media Web

As part of its exploration of requirements and potential solutions to ensure that the Web will function well with TV, the Web and TV Interest Group has launched a Media Pipeline Task Force, set to discuss requirements placed on the HTML5 video, audio and media interfaces by media formats that will be used for Web and TV.

While HTML5 already goes some way to bringing audio and video to the Web, there remain a few areas to address for commercial video service provider to propose high-quality services using the Open Web Platform. A few example use cases that could come to mind:

• Enabling access to parameters controlling the adaptive bitrate algorithm (when such an algorithm is used) and more generically exposing statistics and metrics on media streaming performance.
• Content splicing to link together media content in a continuous stream
• Browser handling of dynamic tracks, for instance when the media stream is of indefinite duration, as happens on a TV channel.
• Enhancements to media elements to augment the video experience with metadata sent in sync with the media stream

The Media Pipeline Task Force is to discuss and propose extensions to the <video> and <audio> elements to support these additional requirements and enable a quality of experience for videos on the Web similar to the one that exists in the traditional TV world.

This Task Force is the second task force of the Web and TV Interest Group. The on-going Home Network Task Force is actively working on a use cases and requirements document to enable home networking scenarios, such as using the Web browser on a mobile device to interact with the TV set.