W3C Video on the Web Workshop

Position Paper
December 12-13, 2007
San Jose, CA

Background

Web video and associated rich-media content (e.g., 3D virtual worlds, MMOGs) have already made the proverbial leap from the incubation/hobbyist stage to initial mainstream adoption with millions of consumers, participants and content choices.  However, these dynamics notwithstanding, current adoption rates lag more mature Web technologies (e.g., HTML-based text, graphics, audio) by several orders of magnitude.  Further, the quality and reliability of the user experience associated with Web video varies widely.

While numerous factors clearly contribute to this heterogeneity and varied adoption pacing, including relatively recent advances in broadband availability and quality, efficient video codecs, and commoditization and simultaneous performance gains in consumer processing (CPU and GPU) and storage technologies, a number of vexing challenges have arisen which are unique to the deployment of high-bandwidth, real-time services such as streaming Web video, interactive multiplayer games and virtual worlds.  The W3C’s new Web Video Initiative appears to be positioned optimally to identify and address a number of these issues, and this paper is offered to highlight several suggested work items.

Problem Statement

Given the unique characteristics of Web video services – namely, (1) bandwidth-intensive transport/distribution, (2) CPU/GPU-intensive encoding/decoding/rendering, (3) very large file sizes, and (4) wide variability in policies associated with distribution, consumption and sharing – numerous technical, business and economic challenges have emerged, representing an inhibiting force in opposition to accelerated adoption.  While some of these challenges should appropriately remain within the competitive domain, allowing for service provider and product differentiation, others represent strategic enablers which may accelerate both producer and consumer adoption of the Web as a rich-media distribution and consumption medium, simultaneously improving the quality of content, the consistency of user experience and the overall economic viability of this emerging sector.

A preliminary list of key market challenges (and, conversely, potential enablers) includes:

• Appreciable cost of high-bandwidth content distribution (typically several orders of magnitude larger than textual, static-graphic or audio content from a time-to-consume perspective)
• Access, regional-area and backbone network capacity management and planning challenges; new economic and operational models will likely be necessary in order to motivate continued capital investment, particularly in the face of high-bandwidth Web video and P2P file-sharing services
• Lack of quantified network performance and QoS metrics and assurances ; compelling network neutrality arguments notwithstanding, not all IP traffic exhibits the same distribution requirements (e.g., bandwidth, latency, jitter and TTL) and some measures should be introduced to address this natural, shared-network heterogeneity
• Pronounced variability in the consumption and availability of (shared or potentially shared) resources (both network and consumer-based); from an economic standpoint this represents inefficiency and waste in current service models, while simultaneously offering the potential for optimizations
• While underlying protocols (XML/RDF), frameworks (REST/WSDL Web services) and tools exist, neither formal nor de facto schemas or standards have emerged for capturing and sharing media metadata throughout the distribution value chain
• Beyond the absence of a consensus media metadata standard, no formal standard exists for consistently identifying and naming media assets ; in the case of professionally-produced, feature-length films as many as 50 versions of a particular asset may be released, thereby severely compounding this problem
• While numerous, proprietary digital rights management and conditional access systems have been widely deployed, in many cases these systems have been used to discourage or prevent subscriber and content mobility; a common, open-standard media policy specification mechanism may help to mitigate this issue
• Content piracy and copyright infringement continues to limit the availability of high-quality content; automated mechanisms should be researched and developed to address this concern

Proposed Work Items

Based upon these market considerations, the following technical work items may prove compelling and valuable in the context of the W3C’s current Web video incubation efforts.  It should also be noted that these further align with the W3C’s overarching “one, fully-actualized Web” charter:

• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture framework and protocol design, emphasizing explicit network feedback, resource negotiation and performance heuristics
  • Ideally, in collaboration with the DCIA’s P4P working group and the IETF’s P2P efforts
  • Explicit resource management mechanisms (e.g., PCMM) should also be considered
• Virtual economic models facilitating fare, efficient and transparent allocation of network bandwidth and client processing and storage resources
  • Possibly, in collaboration with academic research underway in this area at Harvard (SEAS) and elsewhere
• Media metadata schema standardization with extensibility to Semantic Web technologies
  • Ideally, aligned and in ongoing collaboration with similar efforts at CableLabs, MovieLabs and other industry standards organizations
• Digital rights policy specification mechanism/protocol allowing content producers and owners to unambiguously articulate fair-use rights and restrictions in a platform-independent manner
  • Ideally, secured but decoupled from underlying and supporting usage and copy enforcement mechanisms
• Substantial research and innovation has been underway in the areas of digital watermarking and fingerprinting to further mitigate inappropriate distribution and consumption practices

CableLabs and its member MSOs have a significant amount of interest in these and related topics, and I personally look forward to participating in this collaborative industry effort.