Open Media Web

For the second year in a row, I — where I stands for François Daoust, part of the OMWeb team — will be pleased to attend and present at the NEM Summit, 27-29 September 2011, in Torino, Italy. Last year, I focused on the HTML5 <video> tag, showing that it is a useful first step to integrate video on the Web, even though challenges remain. The slides Towards Video on the Web with HTML5 I presented back then, as well as the underlying paper are available online.

Thanks to a series of workshops on the convergence of Web and TV (a third workshop is to take place in Hollywood!) and the creation of the Web and TV Interest Group, W3C has been exploring challenges and potential solutions to ensure a successful convergence between Web and TV. The paper I submitted to NEM Summit this year, Adopting HTML5 for Television: Next Steps (PDF), presents key topics discussed in W3C (e.g. home networking scenarii, extensions to HTML5, etc.) and likely next steps from a standardization perspective.

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.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the US Justice Department is starting to examine whether MPEG-LA is breaking anti-trust with its call for patents that may be infringed by Google’s VP8 codec.