-->
Save your FREE seat for Streaming Media Connect this August. Register Now!

Video: Is CMAF the One Packaging Format to Rule Them All?

Learn more about CMAF and stream packaging at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete panel, T104. The Cutting Edge of Packing Strategies, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

David Sayed: Being pragmatic, you know, it's going to depend on devices aging out. Customers are going to want to deliver content to all of the devices they need to support. That tends to depend on the geographies that they're serving, and there are definitely going to be some devices out there that aren't able to consume CMAF content and so they will continue to need non-CMAF formats. However, I think like everyone else here, being that we're seeing a groundswell of interest in CMAF because people delivering media at scale see the economies of scale that CMAF is actually able to provide, especially in terms of having to deal with the multiple DRM formats because, typically, if you're dealing with premium media, premium content that needs to be encrypted with different DRM formats that need to be native for the specific device for power efficiency and performance and so on, as well as sometimes the licensing content, licensing requirements. CMAF really helps to solve that. Again, in the fullness of time, with the different encryption specifications that Will just mentioned earlier. CMAF, I think, is going to become the predominant format, but depending on the customer that we're talking to, some of those customers will continue to need the more legacy formats that exist today.

David Heppe: I think it's a super good thing for the industry. It's going to help drive cost down, make things more operationally efficient. With my business hat on, I kind of shed a tear a bit because we made a little bit of money on packaging over the years and that need is not going away immediately, as David said, but it will be dampened. I think CMAF just makes a lot more sense functionally and it's the right direction for the industry to go.

Will Law: I think we're naive if we're thinking CMAF is gonna take away all need to prepare some strange derivative. That's going to stick with us forever. Because there are codecs, and in Silicon Valley you can do CMAF all day of this week. But down in Brazil? It's not going to happen for several years. You got a lot of old TVs, they all love Smooth, actually. Smooth is one of the biggest formats in Brazil. So there's a lot of regional requirements to prepare things. You can never--people come to me and say, "CMAF's not working because the world's not 100% on it." It's never going to be that way. If it can get to 80% of the world's on it, that's a win, and that's as good it's gonna get, because after that we're go into codec diversity. Now we start making silos of stuff all over again. We're never gonna get down to one copy for everyone.

David Sayed: If I can add to that, I think that's one of the areas where dynamic packaging, coupled with, potentially technologies like device detection actually end up being interesting because with device detection you could then determine, "Okay, this device is requesting my content, it's a legacy iPhone that only can play back an older version of HLS but I need to be able deliver my content with the original English language but also French subtitles and maybe English subtitles as well." Great. How do I do that in that older format version of HLS? Well, I need to package for that particular device. And so having the ability to dynamically do that, especially if the content is longtail, and be able to provide the specific format that that device actually requires is very helpful in terms of securing device coverages, coverage that OTT platforms, for example, actually need.

Streaming Covers
Free
for qualified subscribers
Subscribe Now Current Issue Past Issues
Related Articles

How to Produce CMAF Output and Testing Playback

CMAF has reached maturity. Here's one way to go about using it, with AWS Elemental MediaConvert

The State of CMAF: The Holy Grail or Just Another Format?

It's all the buzz on the conference circuit, but deployment challenges mean CMAF hasn't taken over the streaming world yet. Here's why it's getting so much attention.

Video: What Is the Role of Packaging in Streaming Delivery?

Microsoft's David Sayed and Akamai's Will Law discuss chunking and the advantages of decoupling encoding or transcoding from packaging in this clip from Streaming Media East 2019.

Video: What Is the Future of CMAF?

RealEyes Media Development Manager John Gainfort discusses CDN scaling, chunked encoding, and their future impact on latency in this clip from his Video Engineering Summit presentation at Streaming Media East 2019.

Video: What Are the Key Features of CMAF?

RealEyes Media Development Manager John Gainfort notes key benefits of CMAF, from improved cache efficiency to providing common ground for industry cooperation in this clip from his Video Engineering Summit presentation at Streaming Media East 2019.

Video: What Is the Goal of CMAF?

NexTreams Multimedia Systems Architect Iraj Sodagar explains the purpose of Common Media Application Format (CMAF) development for attendees at the Video Engineering Summit at Streaming Media West.

Video: What Is CMAF?

NexTreams Multimedia Systems Architect Iraj Sodagar defines the Common Media Application Format (CMAF) for attendees at the Video Engineering Summit at Streaming Media West.