A new industry group, the Streaming Video Alliance (SVA), has formed to work on industry-wide standards and best practices in internet video. There’s 17 members of the group but the problem is, YouTube and Netflix aren’t among them.
The founding members of the SVA do include some big names such as Alcatel-Lucent, Charter, Cisco, Comcast, Epix, Fox Networks Group, Major League Baseball and Yahoo. However, since YouTube and Netflix are the two biggest sources of bandwidth usage in the world, they’re major omissions.
The group plans to focus on three areas: open architecture, defining specifications for network and cloud-based streaming and caching infrastructure; quality of experience; and interoperability to create standards for streaming video.
The SVA will meet at least twice a year in person. It isn’t intended to be a standards body but will propose technical specifications to relevant standards bodies. Hopefully for them, Netflix and YouTube will think their ideas are worth picking up on, particularly as the net neutrality debate in the US gets ever more bitter.
We’ve contacted Netflix and Google to find out whether they’ll be joining the SVA any time soon and will update this post with their response.
Update: a Netflix spokesperson says: “We aren’t planning to join. Given the scale of Netflix video traffic, we custom-built our Open Connect network to ensure Netflix members have the best viewing experience and we provide it free to ISPs.”
➤Streaming Video Alliance (via Variety)
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