I saw a lot written lately about this new file format being proposed called MPEG DASH (stands for “Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP”).  I hear it was a big topic of discussion at the Streaming Media West conference recently.  The new standard is making its way through the ISO ratification process, and could be adopted by early next year.

Why is this big news?  The web is increasing going to be a place where people consume video content.  I recently saw someone refer to this time as the “videoization” of the internet.  But the problem is that we’ve got a number of competing formats and codecs, not to mention different devices, running a variety of Operating Systems and dozens of screen sizes and resolutions.  This market fragmentation makes it very hard to distribute video content efficiently.

The major movie studios adopted Ultraviolet, which standardizes their delivery format and encryption.  But the rest of us are still victims of the format wars between Microsoft, Apple, and Google, who all have competing (and incompatible), proprietary delivery formats.  With the Flash video format losing ground fast, it looks like MP4 will be the winner (using HTML5), so the possibility that all of the major players could agree on a delivery spec is enticing.

One potential fly in the ointment is that Mozilla (who’s Firefox has about a quarter of the browser market) is totally committed to an open source world.  They’ve said that they won’t implement DASH unless it’s royalty-free.  So that means that the other players will have to agree to make DASH royalty-free.  Which neither Microsoft or Apple have been willing to agree to in the past.  But it sure would be great if there was one, universally supported video delivery format.

Come on guys.  You’ve got enough of our money already.  Put aside the competition and rivalry to get something done that will help everyone.  Make it happen for the good of all, for once.