DASH-IF announces 2nd Community Review: Candidate Technical Specification on Content Steering for DASH

On December 21st, 2022, DASH-IF published the DASH-IF Candidate Technical Specification on Content Steering for DASH is available here for a 2nd community review. After receiving excellent feedback from the community for the first review, the spec was updated within DASH-IF.

Scope of the specification: Content distributors often use multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to distribute their content to the end-users. They may upload a copy of their catalogue to each CDN, or more commonly have all CDNs pull the content from a common origin. Alternate URLs are generated, one for each CDN, that point at identical content. DASH players may access alternate URLs in the event of delivery problems. Content steering describes a deterministic capability for a content distributor to switch the content source that a player uses either at start-up or midstream, by means of a remote steering service.

This is the result of the work in the Live and Ad Insertion task force in DASH-IF. The work is led by Will Law from Akamai and is supported by several DASH-IF members: Akamai, Disney Streaming, Comcast, AWS Elemental and Qualcomm.

This second community review is open until Feb 15th, 2023. Publication is expected by March 31, 2023. Comments may be submitted through the github.

This document is a candidate Technical Specification. DASH-IF is expecting to publish this initially, but to submit the specification to a formal specification organization. The primary choice is ETSI, for which DASH-IF has a PAS agreement.