Tech companies form MPEG DASH promo group

A number of TV technology companies have grouped together to create the DASH Promoters Group, a new organization designed to drive adoption of the MPEG DASH standard for adaptive bit-rate encoding.

The MPEG DASH standard was ratified in November and is designed to address the dramatic growth of internet video by defining a universal delivery format that enables video streams to adapt dynamically to the available bandwidth.

Microsoft, Netflix, and Qualcomm are the founding members. Other companies rounding out the membership at the time of this announcement include: Adobe, AEG Digital Media, Akamai, BuyDRM, Digital Rapids, Digital TV Labs, Dolby, EBU-UER, Elemental, Envivio, Ericsson, Harmonic, Intertrust, NDS, Packet Ship, Path1, RGB Networks, Samsung, Thomson, University of Klagenfurt, and ZiXi.

As part of their strategy to accelerate DASH adoption, the group is demonstrating DASH streaming video at Mobile World Congress at Qualcomm’s stand. The demo features a live video stream encoded for DASH ISO-Base Live Profile by Harmonic, ingested to Akamai’s CDN and delivered to a Snapdragon processor-based mobile development platform from Qualcomm for playback.