The State of MPEG-DASH 2016 (Part I)

The industry is turning away from plug-ins and embracing HTML5 everywhere. Here's how the vendor-independent streaming standard is gaining momentum.

If you ask industry experts about future streaming formats, most will say they see a combination of MPEG-DASH for the majority of new platforms and HLS for iOS and legacy devices. The move has begun, first with DASH replacing other ABR formats, such as HDS and Smooth Streaming, which are suffering from the no-plugin browser trend. The deprecation of the old Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) in Chrome in September 2015 was the first major signal of this trend. As Microsoft didn’t want to issue a new version of the Silverlight plug-in using the new Chrome Pepper API (PPAPI), all content providers using Smooth Streaming through Silverlight-based players were forced to find an alternative. Some of them chose to stay with Smooth Streaming for now and use hasplayer.js (a fork of dash.js v1.2), which can play Smooth Streaming content through Media Source Extensions (MSE). But that’s risky for several reasons, including DRM support, since PlayReady is not supported in Chrome and would instead require an on-the-fly translation to Widevine Modular DRM. And for content providers delivering streams in the clear, Smooth Streaming over hasplayer.js is not an ideal long-term approach either, as the evolution of dash.js deviated from the cross-format support that was initially proposed by the framework. All the concerned content providers are now working on migrating their Smooth players to DASH for the most recent platforms, and to HLS for legacy platforms, such as the Xbox 360, where DASH support needs extra development.

NEXT: Part II   >