Marrying WebRTC and DASH for Interactive Streaming

Abstract

WebRTC is a set of W3C and IETF standards that allows the delivery of real-time content to users, with an end-to-end latency of under half a second. Support for WebRTC is built into all modern browsers across desktop and mobile devices, and it allows for streaming of video, audio and data. While the original focus of WebRTC has been on videoconferencing, it is increasingly being used today for real-time streaming of premium content because its ultra-low latency features enable several new user experiences, especially those that involve user interactivity, that are not easy to deliver or even possible with the traditional broadcast or streaming delivery protocols. Because of this increasing usage for premium content, the integration of WebRTC with the de facto adaptive streaming protocols such as MPEG's Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is essential. This paper gives information about the DASH Industry Forum's exploration activity on this very subject.