The Streaming Video Alliance (SVA), a group formed in late 2014 to establish specs and best practices for video streaming, has added some heft to the cause with the addition of Google.

Google, a streaming giant via way of YouTube and its relatively new YouTube TV service, was named as a new member this week during the SVA’s fourth annual meeting in New York hosted by Viacom. Of recent note, Google has also gotten behind AV1, a new royalty-free, next-gen codec that is initially focused on OTT video apps and services.

RELATED: Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Turned Loose

Also new to SVA is Videastream. Other members include Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Arris, Bamtech Media, Beamr, Charter Communications, CenturyLink, Comcast, Conviva, Liberty Global, NBCU, NeuLion, Sky, Verizon, Viacom and Nokia, among others. A big name still absent from SVA’s list is Netflix.

RELATED: Charter, Verizon Among Group to Trial New ‘Open Caching’ Architecture

This week’s SVA meeting included a keynote by Alec Hendry, senior director of technology convergence at Viacom and Dino Covelli, director of emerging streaming technology at Viacom. The agenda also featured the HEVC Licensing Symposium, including players from the HEVC’s various patent pools, and a session focused on the challenges of massive live, synchronized events from Wowza’s Chris Michaels. 

In a move that aims to bring more scale to over-the-top video services, Qwilt and content delivery network provider Limelight Networks have stitched together an integrated caching system that places more content toward the edge of the network and closer to the end user.

The integration combines Limelight’s CDN with Qwilt’s “open” caching in ISP networks around the world.

The linkup with Limelight will help to improve the quality of experience and lower latencies of OTT services, Qwilt CEO and co-founder Alon Maor said.

While Limelight is the first on board with such an integration, Maor stressed that the agreement is not exclusive and that Qwilt has trials ongoing with other CDN and streaming infrastructure providers. He also noted that this is a technical integration, and that no money is being exchanged as a result.

“This is a very meaningful step toward an internet that’s not just for open connectivity, but also content delivery that’s closer to the edge,” Maor said.

Related: Qwilt Takes Live Streaming, VR to the Edge

He also confirmed that the work between Qwilt and Limelight stems from an “open caching” architecture/initiative that’s been undertaken by the Streaming Video Alliance that aims to drive more scale and quality into online video.

The SVA, a group formed in late 2014, is focused on specs and best practices for video streaming. Charter Communications, Limelight, Qwilt, Verizon Communications, Viacom, Yahoo and ViaSat were among the first group of companies to get directly involved in the SVA’s open caching project.

Joe Inzerillo, executive vice president and CTO for BAMTech and a special advisor to Major League Baseball, has joined the board of Qwilt, a company that specializes in open caching systems for over-the-top and IP video apps and services.

BAMTech is the recently formed, Disney-backed technology services and video streaming spin-off of MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM).

RELATED: Disney Buys One-Third of BAMTech for $1 Billion

Qwilt and MLBAM are founding members of the Streaming Video Alliance, a group that focuses on standards and best practices for online video. The SVA formed in the fall of 2014, and counts Comcast and Liberty Global among its members.

RELATED: Perchance to Stream (subscription required)

As an SVA member, Qwilt is also involved in a new open caching architecture that’s designed to drive more quality and scale into live and on-demand streaming.

RELATED: Charter, Verizon Among Group to Trial New ‘Open Caching’ Architecture

“Streaming video continues to grow and has become an unstoppable force of nature,” Inzerillo said, in a statement. “ Alon [Maor, Qwilt’s CEO] and I share a common vision to define and enable the new architecture for streaming which relies more on the reach, scale and quality of Internet service provider network infrastructure for content and application delivery. This new architecture, the Edge Cloud in service provider networks, is essential to the long-term scaling of content and application delivery.”

Qwilt has taken the wraps of an upgraded edge computing platform that aims to enable low-latency and boost the performance of bandwidth-intensive 4K live streaming and virtual/augmented reality apps and services.

Its Open Edge Cloud platform also comes with a set of APIs for publishers and commercial content delivery networks that work with service providers.

Qwilt is launching the upgraded software-powered platform as service operators continue to establish edge computing capacities for fixed and mobile services, Dan Sahar, a co-founder of Qwilt and the company’s VP of product marketing, said.

The new platform is made up of an edge cloud node that can site deep in the operator’s network, or even reside in a residential form-factor like a home gateway, and complement and extend centralized cloud infrastructures. That element connects to a management system that maps the nodes, and can also create a global API for the publisher ecosystem.

He said Qwilt’s new platform ties into a new “Open Caching” specification/architecture developed by the Streaming Video Alliance. Qwilt, along with fellow SVA members Charter Communications, Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Verizon, Viacom, ViaSat and Yahoo are among the first that will try out a range of use cases of the specs. 

RELATED: Charter, Verizon Among Group to Trial New ‘Open Caching’ Architecture

Qwilt has been offering the new capabilities via an upgrade that is being distributed to its deployment partners, which number more than 100. Announced Qwilt partners include Mediacom, Communications,  Telecom Italia, Choice Cable, On Telecom, Toyama (Japan), the Natioal Cable Television Cooperative (customer/reseller),  Conway Corp., Orcon, CallPlus, KBRO, Wananchi, Afrihost, and Digicell.

The Streaming Video Alliance, a  cross-industry group formed in late 2014 that counts Comcast and Liberty Global  among its members, said it has added a study group focused on virtual reality and 360-degree video.

SVA said VR and 360 video has “the potential to revolutionize the video experience,” but argued that widespread adoption will be challenged by a lack of industry standards.

RELATED:  Streaming Video Alliance Taps First Executive Director

The working group will aim to identify opportunities for developing best practices around VR, and expects to issue a report on its findings in Q2 2017.

SVA announced the new working group amid the start of its quarterly member meeting, hosted by Level 3 Communications this week in Denver.

SVA also said its Quality of Experience Working Group plans to finalize documents for distribution to the CTA, and its Open Caching Working  Group will be in member voting.

RELATED: Sky Launches VR Content Initiative

The group also announced that Adobe has joined the SVA. Other Alliance members include Arris, Cedexis, Charter Communications, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Concurrent Computer Corp., Conviva, Encompass TV, Ericsson, Fox Networks, Hughes Satellite Systems, IneoQuest, Intel, Irdeto, Level 3 Communications, Limelight Networks, MediaMelon, MLBAM, Mobolize, Nagra, NBCU, NeuLion, Nice People at Work, Nokia, Nominum, Ownzones, Qwilt, Sky, System73, Telecom Italia, Telstra, Ustream (now part of IBM), ViaPlay, ViaSat Inc., Verimatrix, Verizon, Vubiquity, Wowza Media Systems and Yahoo.

The Streaming Video Alliance, a group that counts Comcast and Charter Communications among its backers, and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) said they are collaborating to develop industry-wide guidelines that will formalize metrics and terminologies related to streaming media Quality of Experience (QoE).

The CTA R4 Video Systems Committee has also established the QoE working group, WG 20, to bring visibility and accuracy to over-the-top (OTT) video metrics, they said. That working group will be chaired by Conviva, CTA said.

RELATED: Streaming Video Alliance Names Officers

“With the rapid growth of video streaming, on everything from mobile devices to 4K Ultra HD TVs, the importance of this initiative has never been greater,” said Brian Markwalter, CTA’s SVP, research and standards, in a statement. “Businesses rely on measurements to improve their services, and standardization will help enormously with the interoperability of analytics for improved visibility and accuracy of OTT video metrics. These measurement metrics will help everyone in the streaming video ecosystem move towards a more responsive, high-quality and seamless experience.”

“The Alliance has made great strides in solving important industry issues such as QoE to help advance the future of OTT video. We remain focused on fostering deeper ecosystem collaboration and promoting best practices across the streaming video industry,” added Jason Thibeault, SVA’s executive director. “We look forward to extending our collaboration with the CTA and other industry leaders to formalize guidelines for a uniform methodology every streaming video publisher can use for QoE.”

The SVA was formed in 2014.

The Steaming Video Alliance, a cross-industry group formed in 2004 dedicated to best practices and technical requirements for online video, has appointed four new officers, including Joe Inzerillo, EVP and CTO of MLBAM, who is on board as the organization’s president.

Other new officers include:

-Vice President: Richard Brownrigg, VP of Online Products and Technology Design, Liberty Global;

-Secretary: Brian Stevenson, Head of Video Product, Nokia; and

-Treasurer: Yves Boudreau, Technology Strategy TV and Media - Office of the CTO, Ericsson

Those appointments come almost three months after SVA named Jason Thibeault as its first executive director.

The SVA timed the officer announcements amid its first international Quarterly Member Meeting, which is taking place in London at Sky’s headquarters, and arrives as the group tries

“Expanding our quarterly meetings beyond the U.S. is a historic moment for the Alliance and true testament to our commitment in serving the wider global online video industry,” Thibeault said in a statement. “We look forward to further international expansion as the Alliance grows and the continued pursuit of our vision for the future of streaming – remaining focused on fostering industry collaboration that will help define the open architecture for streaming.”

“This is an exciting – yet challenging – time in the streaming industry, particularly in the OTT business, and the Alliance has brought the digital video market a great sense of leadership,” Inzerillo added. “With much work ahead of us, it’s vital that we continue to help formulate and propel the implementation of the organization’s strategic plans and help the Alliance further drive industry collaboration and standards. It’s an honor to be stepping into this new role.”

Members of SVA include a broad range of suppliers, distributors, and programmers, including Arris, , Cedexis, Charter Communications, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Concurrent, Conviva, Encompass TV, Ericsson, Fox Networks, Hughes Satellite Systems, IneoQuest, Intel, Irdeto, Level 3 Communications, Liberty Global, Limelight Networks, MediaMelon, MLBAM, Mobolize, Nagra, NBCUniversal, NeuLion, Nice People at Work, Nokia, Nominum, OWNZONES, Qwilt, Sky, System73, Telecom Italia, Telstra, Ustream, ViaPlay, ViaSat Inc., Verimatrix, Verizon, Vubiquity, Wowza Media Systems and Yahoo.

The Streaming Video Alliance (SVA), a cross-industry group formed in late 2014, has tapped Jason Thibeault as its first executive director.  

Thibeault, who is late of content delivery network company Limelight Networks and was a founder and CTO of a mobile-focused company called GoWare, will serve as the SVA’s “chief evangelist and advocate” within the streaming industry, the organization said.

The SVA also announced the appointment of two new board members, Yves Boudreau, CTO of TV and media technology strategy at Ericsson, and Keith Zubchevich, chief strategy officer, Conviva.

In an interview, Thibeault said his top priorities include ensuring that the SVA continues to produce technical requirements, best practices and other documents that could eventually lead to industry-wide standards; to generate more awareness of the org and its aims (he said SVA wants to become a “lightning rod” for streaming video; and to expand the SVA’s membership base, which currently includes a broad mix of tech vendors, ISPs, and content providers.

That group (see the full list below) currently has some big names from the streaming world that’s still absent, including Netflix, Amazon and Google/YouTube, and the SVA wants to change that.

Per the SVA’s Web site, principal membership, which includes engagement in working groups and voting on technical committee proposed specs, and eligibility to be elected to the SVA’s  board, runs $10,000 per year, while supporting membership costs $5,000 per year, and allows for the review or working documents and to audit meetings.

As for deliverables, the SVA has released two approved guideline documents  -- Open Caching Systems Functional Requirements and QoE Industry Guidelines. While some of the SVA’s work could eventually evolve into standards or quasi-standards, most of the current focus is around technical requirements, guidelines and best practices for video streaming.

“We’re not necessarily trying to define what online video is, but to help shape it” by working with a broad cross-section of the industry, Thibeault said.

The SVA’s next quarterly meeting is scheduled for Sept. 7 in London, just ahead of the IBC show in Amsterdam.

The SVA’s membership currently includes Beamr, Cedexis, Charter Communications, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Concurrent, Conviva, Encompass TV, Ericsson, FOX Networks, Hughes Satellite Systems, IneoQuest, Intel, Irdeto, Korea Telecom, Level 3 Communications, Liberty Global, Limelight Networks, MediaMelon, MLB Advanced Media, Mobolize, Nagra, NBCUniversal, NeuLion, Nice People at Work, Nokia, Nominum, PeerApp, Qwilt, Sky, System73, Telecom Italia, Telstra, Ustream (now part of IBM), ViaSat Inc., Verimatrix, Verizon, Vubiquity, Wowza Media Systems and Yahoo.

Despite every effort to deliver the best user experience, how do you really know it’s the best if you’re not measuring the right metrics?

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all global consumer Internet traffic in 2019. Consumers have voted with their eyeballs and binge-watching is here to stay. With TVs now wider than the average loveseat, and rapidly approaching sofa-size, achieving the broadcast-quality that viewers demand is anything but a trivial feat.

Since you can’t optimize what you can’t measure, the first step is clearly to gather video quality metrics. But which metrics? “Good” and “great” are relative, especially with no industry standards for measurement and statistical aggregation.

Quick - How do you calculate a rebuffer ratio? What about percentage of buffer-impacted-views? Is your reported average bitrate a measure of all bits on the wire, or of the labeled video bitrate?

Achieving consensus on units of measure matters.  Did you know that Napoleon Bonaparte was actually not short for his time? The myth started because he was documented as being 5’2” tall, but they were using pre-French Revolution units of measure. In modern units, he was actually nearly 5’7”, which was taller than the average Frenchman of the era!

The good news for measuring the quality of online video is we can borrow substantially from other industries’ experiences establishing experience metrics in hopes of bringing about standards in a much faster fashion.

For example, it took nearly 20 years after the introduction of digital cable for the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) to publish industry standards to provide cable operators with reliable tools to measure and improve the customer experience. The first Web APM vendors hit the scene decades ago, not long after the surge in popularity of HTML and the web. The primary approaches initially included monitoring on the server-side and measuring periodically from distributed test servers located in data centers. This allowed operations teams to know when their servers were completely down or consistently slow, but failed to catch most other issues.

Over time, measuring the actual end-user experience became crucial and as a result, Real User Monitoring (RUM) was developed. RUM involves sending actual end-user performance data from the browser back to a central location for collection. Initially, all implementations were “roll your own” and ensuring support and data consistency across all browsers was impossible.

In 2010, the Web Performance Working Group (W3C) was founded to create standards for measuring and improving web application performance. Their initial focus was on making metrics available to web developers via client-side APIs. To date, they have been successful at ushering in many excellent specifications for in-browser performance diagnostics such as Navigation Timing, Resource Timing and User Timing. However the collection, or beaconing, was quite literally “left as an exercise for the reader.” On Feb. 9, 2016, they addressed this by publishing a draft of the Beacon API, a specification that defines how to collect this valuable data without impacting performance.

In short, it took a significant amount of time to acknowledge the need for, create and fine-tune standards for performance and quality metrics.  We are just now beginning to realize the benefits of standardization.

Online video metrics that measure customer experiences –  often referred to as QoE (Quality of Experience) metrics –  cannot be accurately measured from the server delivering the content. Many experience-degrading factors occur between the end-user and the server, including congestion and resource exhaustion on the end-user’s side. Therefore, beaconing, or the sending of telemetry from the playback device, has emerged as a more accurate approach. But the problem is that there are no standard definitions of the metrics or standard APIs for accessing them across players.

Further complicating things is the breadth of devices and applications that can play video – browsers, smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, Smart TVs and more. The video players also vary and can be custom, third party or sometimes native to the device. Not surprisingly, some or all of the metrics of interest aren’t accessible in every case, and with contemporaneous industry initiatives to encourage cross-platform compatibility, increased security and device stability, the problem is getting worse.

Where do we go from here? 

Fortunately, the Streaming Video Alliance, an organization seeking to develop, publish and promote open standards, policies and best practices in the video streaming ecosystem, is working to promote standards for QoE metrics for this industry. The group is currently working on rigorous definitions of end-user quality metrics and statistical aggregations for rolling up millions of such data points. Not the most exciting work, but you have start somewhere, and establishing a common language should pay dividends on its own.

Sound familiar? Hopefully this time we will make progress faster.  The solution is left as an exercise for the reader.

Jason Hofmann is a Senior Director, Advanced Architecture at Limelight Networks, a leading global content delivery network and founding member of the Streaming Video Alliance. 

The Streaming Video Alliance (SVA) has published the guiding principles and system attributes that have been developed by its Open Caching Working Group.

The SVA was established by a number of major companies in the online video sector to help the industry overcome problems in expanding the online delivery of content by developing open architectures and standards. 

As part of that push, SVA set up the Open Caching Working Group to develop proposed standards, best practices and policy for a new layer of content caching within the ISP network that are close to consumers. 

Open caches offer a number of clear benefits by aggregating “compute and storage resources that complements, extends and enhances that of any individual CDN,” the group noted.

Read more at B&C. 

A group of distributors, vendors and content providers are putting their collective weight behind the Streaming Video Alliance, a group that will strive to create an open architecture for online video, including benchmarks for video quality and product interoperability.

The initial group that ’s backing the SVA comprises highly recognizable names from the pay TV industry, including Comcast, Viacom, Charter Communications and Liberty Global (see sidebar), but a couple from the online video world — primarily Netlfix and Google — are noticeably absent.

While the SVA will focus on architecture creation, best practices and recommending standards designed to facilitate the scaling of online video, it’s “not looking to be a standards body,” Dan Rayburn, a founding member of the SVA and an executive at StreamingMedia.com, said.

Rayburn said the SVA is starting to pore over pieces of the video ecosystem and expects to make some decisions by early 2015 about which elements to focus on first. Some potential candidates include best practices around metadata and 4K streaming.

Rayburn also expects that the SVA will announce additional members, including more content owners, in January.

SVA membership won’t be free. The group will publish its fee schedule early next year.

Whether Netflix, Google and YouTube, which tend to do their own thing, will eventually join the SVA crew is hard to say.

“We’ve had discussions with them,” said Rayburn, a recognized streaming-video industry expert who is on board to help promote the organization and communicate its aims. “We’ve had conversations with pretty much all of the largest content owners you can think of.”

On Board With the SVA

The initial membership slate of the Streaming Video Alliance represents various parts of the ecosystem.

Alcatel-Lucent
Charter Communications
Cisco Systems
Comcast
Epix
Fox Networks
KT
Level 3 Communications
Liberty Global
Limelight Networks
MLB Advanced Media
Qwilt
Telecom Italia
Telstra
Ustream
Wowza Media Systems
Yahoo