Industry Leaders Join Forces to Form Streaming Video Alliance

In an effort to develop universal standards and best practices for high-scale Internet video services, 17 content companies, service providers and technology vendors have gathered to create the Streaming Video Alliance. Together, these companies hope to improve the online video experience. SVA will initially focus on open architecture, quality of experience, and interoperability. Formation of the group comes as net neutrality continues its path as a complex and controversial issue.

The group consists of the following companies: Alcatel-Lucent, Charter Communications, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Epix, Fox Networks Group, Korea Telecom, Level 3 Communications, Liberty Global, Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Qwilt, Telecom Italia, Telstra, Ustream, Wowza Media Systems and Yahoo.

Streaming_Video_Alliance

These companies belong to one of three different memberships including the sponsor/founding membership, full membership, and supporting member with annual fees of $25,000, $12,500 and $5,500 respectively, Variety reports.

Interestingly, SVA was founded without Netflix or YouTube, which are currently the greatest sources of Internet bandwidth usage, and have both invested heavily in their own distribution infrastructures.

Variety reports that the “group will focus on three initial areas: open architecture, to define specifications for network and cloud-based streaming and caching infrastructure; quality of experience, to create a common approach to defining, measuring, optimizing and reporting quality of the video streaming; and interoperability, to create standards for streaming video.”

No Comments Yet

You can be the first to comment!

Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.