Interoperability and Media Over QUIC
Interoperability is always a critical issue with emerging streaming protocols, and—no different from any other protocol still in development—for Media over QUIC (MoQ), interop remains a work in progress. Help Me Stream Research Foundation’s Timothy Fore-Siglin, Akamai’s Will Law, and nanocosmos’ Oliver Lietz discuss the ongoing challenges and likely outcomes in this clip from May’s Streaming Media Connect.
Interop Is Difficult Mid-Build
Help Me Stream Research Foundation Founder Timothy Fore-Siglin starts by acknowledging that interoperability is an evergreen issue with new protocols. He asks, “How do companies building players that are reliant on MOQ [transport] or web transport make sure they’re interoperable with what … the core transport is?”
Akamai Chief Architect Will Law notes that frequent changes in draft specifications hurt interoperability efforts. He likens the process to erecting a multi-story building—you can’t start bringing in furniture when you’re adding a new floor to the building every week. He says the current draft is the eleventh one published, and every month or so, a new draft spec comes out. “So if you’re trying to build, interop is hard,” he states. “We have interop events every three months, and there’s teams of engineers working to try to make sure everything matches. And we have some interop today, but I would say it’s pretty low because of the rate at which features are being changed.”
Law confirms that the ultimate goal is to stabilise the improvements. As a specification is released as an RFC (request for comment), then interop follows, he notes. “And then we want to have very few changes to it going forward. We are designing extensions into it, so all the things we forget to add right now, we can extend them in the future by adding these custom extensions to objects without having to go ahead and revise the whole RFC.”
Fore-Siglin asks if Law has a general sense of when the changes will come to an end.
Law groans. “I hope before the end of this year, but …” He starts to say that he’s gotten different answers, but instead of opening up that potential can of worms, he ends up simply noting that it’s difficult to define “done” on a spec.
Fore-Siglin replies, “Fair enough.”
nanocosmos Takes a Holistic View
There are already “cool demos that are done,” Law continues. “And Oliver has deployed [MoQ], right? So he’s just taken a slice and he controls both ends of the chain. He can deploy a static version, but his version won’t operate with anyone else’s yet.” He reiterates, “But clearly we want interop. That is the whole goal here, and for interrupt to happen, the RFC must be stable.”
Law is referring to nanocosmos CEO Oliver Lietz, who jumps into the conversation to emphasise that his company created its end-to-end solution deliberately because of how challenging it is for everyone to integrate a “player from one vendor, CDN from another vendor, encoder from another vendor, et cetera. And then you need to switch protocols between different things like HLS-DASH and all these things. That’s why we decided to bring everything together in an end-to-end platform and take the holistic point of view,” he says. This creates a better user experience for customers.
Lietz is still using open standards “because it’s a great benefit to have [them] and to open up when needed and when possible—for example, to scale out maybe to CDNs like Akamai and use that as a point for better distribution on a large scale or so. But it really depends on the requirements and the use case,” he explains.
Interop Down the Line
Fore-Siglin closes the conversation by drawing parallels with his past experiences in video conferencing, where standards and proprietary features coexisted. “[I]t sounds like we’re almost in that same kind of model here where it’s, you at nanocosmos can do it. Then as the standard matures, you can come back and take a look at interoperability down the line,” he muses.
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