Common media application format. Implementation and analysis

Abstract

Internet streaming companies are an important business nowadays streaming all kinds of content to a growing audience. Although streaming over HTTP is standardized, there has been a lot of fragmentation in the market due to the lack of collaboration between streaming companies and devices, this affects the company operations because of how they manage all the technologies together. This fragmentation ends up degenerating into an inefficiency for the companies, from the technological, operational and productive point of view. To solve this issue, large companies in the streaming sector such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Netflix, along with other companies in the electronics world, like Samsung and LG, have agreed to design a new file format ready to break with the existing fragmentation. This new format is called Common Media Application Format (CMAF) and is expected to be widely accepted by all companies related to the world of streaming. This document presents a test carried out at RakutenTV studying the implementation of CMAF in the operations of the company and analyzing the its feasibility for a long-term run. Like many other companies, RakutenTV suffers from fragmentation which has a direct impact on the performance of the platform and the economic cost of maintaining it. With the new solution, it is expected to be able to offer a more efficient service and reduce the economic impact derived from the management and storage of current files.