December 2014

WebRTC

• VP8 and H.264 mandated: see Codecs below

• Really experimental WebRTC VP9 support in Canary with --enable-webrtc-vp9-support
• EU WebRTC security report
• Analysis of IE and WebRTC
• Manipulate objects in VR using your phone via WebRTC
• Skype founder backs Wire
• Oracle 'Enterprise Communications Experience'
• Project Squared: Cisco 'business collaboration app' (Collaboration Cloud backend)
• How to enable Hello (WebRTC video chat) in Firefox 34 if you don't have it by default
• With WebRTC, the Skype's no longer the limit

MSE

• Spec now at w3c.github.io/media-source

EME
• Spec now at w3c.github.io/encrypted-media

Codecs, containers, compression
• IETF overwhelming consensus that browsers must implement both VP8 and H.264; non-browsers must implement both (or either, if that codec is royalty free):

• ietf.org/proceedings/91/slides/slides-91-rtcweb-7.pdf
• ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg13432.html 

• VP9 WebRTC – see WebRTC above
• Windows 10 Native Support for MKV and FLAC
• The Case for VP9

• iPhone 6 FaceTime now Supports H.265. Where is VP9 for WebRTC?
• VP8 hardware encode support substantially improved in Lollipop: 'Nexus 5, 6, and 9 support HW encode/decode in L via MediaCodec, with other devices coming soon as they update to L.'
• MQA 'studio-quality music streaming technology'

Web VTT
• Working Draft

Media 
• 'Five years ago, most of Facebook was text and if you fast forward five years, probably most of it is going to be video, just because it's getting easier to capture video of moments of your lives and share it.' – Mark Zuckerberg's first public Q&A (answer from about 37:46)
• Laser + radio backhaul 2Gbps up to 10km
• Mail Online TV?
• Yahoo! to acquired BrightRoll
• Why you can't get 4K Netflix and Amazon on a PC or Mac
• YouTube is the new TV
• YouTube launches monthly, ad-free music subscription service: could make $500m within one year
• YouTube For Android Gets Offline Playback… But In India, Indonesia And Philippines Only
• Ofcom Children’s Digital Day report: '11–15s squeeze nine and a half hours’ worth of media and communications activity into just over seven hours each day', teenagers watch TV half as much as adults
• The Final Countdown for NPAPI

And finally…
• Amazon Echo
• Amazon has no taste
• 1:1 aspect ratio Eizo monitor
• Full duplex radio for mobile phones
• From the vaults: TV Isn't Broken, So Why Fix It?
• Pesky robot cameras
• Larry Page tops Media Guardian 100
• The rise and rise of… vinyl (sales up 49% from last year)

November 2014

WebRTC
• WebRTC in development for IE
• Highfive video conferencing (product demo video)
• H.264 available to WebRTC in Firefox 33 (released 14 October) but with caveats
• WebRTC, Web Audio and WebGL in WebView (updated to Chrome 37) on Android Lollipop (and WebView can now be updated from Google Play)
• Firefox Hello: video chat client built into the browser
• Firebase and WebRTC?
• Layer

Codecs
• iPhone 6 FaceTime now Supports H.265. Where is VP9 for WebRTC?

Web Audio
• Under Milk Wood: Richard Burton + BBC R&D

Media
• A Comparative Evaluation of Current HTML5 Web Video Implementations
• UK viewers ‘spend five hours a week watching TV, clips and films online’
• CBS web-only streaming service
• Xiaomi invests $1bn in internet TV content

And finally…
• Amazon Fire TV Stick
• FireChat and Hong Kong protests
• Non-Google Android

July 2014

Audio
• Amazing demo: audio recovered from video

WebRTC
• How does Hangouts use WebRTC?

EME
• Toshiba 'Hybridcast' TV with WebKit-based browser supporting EME

June 2014

WebRTC

• Plugin-free Hangouts!
• WebRTC + Google Glass for healthcare
• Mystery Mozilla project: video chat client
• RailsConf 2014: WebRTC Forever (Greg Baugues from Twilio)
• O'Reilly WebRTC book
• Serverless WebRTC: npmjs.org/package/serverless-webrtc
• Google I/O live session: Making Music Mobile
• WebRTC presentation from Justin and Serge at SFO event
• WebRTC article in the Economist

EME
• Firefox to implement EME
• Safari adds support for 'HTML5 Premium Video' (aka EME) and WebGL

Media
• YouTube announces 60fps support
• Intent to Implement DataCue: an API for 'data cues' intended for JavaScript handling, not browser rendering 
• HTML5 Video in Safari on OS X Yosemite (Netflix blog)
• Easy audio capture with the MediaRecorder API
• Firefox 30 released with VP9 decoding and support for Opus

And finally…
• Blink Intent to ship Web Crypto
• Web Audio, Media Capture, ES6, Promises, HTTP/2 in development for IE: status.modern.ie.
• AT&T to buy DirecTV for $48.5bn
• Freesat offering paid content in deal with film company Curzon
• Google reportedly set to buy Twitch
• Spotify doubles subscribers in 18 months
• YouTube and indie labels
• Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2014 first slide:

May 2014

WebRTC
• apprtc.appspot.com parameters: great post from Silvia Pfeiffer
• Patch to avoid redundant permission prompt clicks with getUserMedia()
• Constraints proposal (from Jan-Ivar Bruaroey's slides):

video: {
  require: ["width", "height"],
  prefer: ["aspectRatio", "frameRate"],
  width: { min: 640, max: 1280, ideal: 1280 },
  height: { min: 480, max: 768, ideal: 768 },
  aspectRatio: 16/9,
  frameRate: 60
}   

• WebRTC is for losers
• Logitech TV Cam HD: 'Skype – now on your TV'
• Symple WebRTC video chat and messaging: connect with another user, not a room name
• dropple.me: data channel file sharing by sharing a link to 'get' a file, rather than sharing a link to 'send' a file
• Claremont University classroom app: minerva.kgi.edu/academics/classroom_experience
• Snapchat video chat is powered by WebRTC
• Why Socket.io doesn't scale for signaling
• New WebRTC 1.0 editor's draft
• Screen sharing proposal
• First draft of ORTC (blog post)
• WebGL rendering of depth video stream from getUserMedia

Media
• Media Source Extensions: Mozilla Intent to Implement
groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/riNZvj66Gs4/qCKxtDs2yWEJ (thanks @HTML5Weekly)

And finally…
• Cheap, lensless camera
• Sub-$1000 Logitech 1080p/30fps pan-tilt-zoom USB camera
• Rise of wifi and BYOD
• RIP Flash:

Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and … Flash. All three of these mediums need a player to work, and all three mediums are either dead or dying. Just as CDs replaced tapes as a more efficient means of playing music, and digital files replaced CDs to do the same, HTML5 is making Flash obsolete.

• Washington Post moving from web to native on iOS
• Amazon Fire TV: $99 dual wifi set top box
• Broadcom released the full source of the OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 driver stack for the Broadcom VideoCore® IV 3D graphics subsystem 

• TalkTalk and Sky are building a fibre network in York
• Amazon to stream HBO shows
• …and Netflix getting cable channel
• Fanbase v audience at YouTube
• Beyoncé releases an album – within a week it's as if it had never happened:

Despite the repeated pieties about the magic of creativity and the special skills of writers, image makers and personalities, content is not king. Delivery has mounted its throne and has already eaten its lunch. To take an example from the Jurassic era of pop, in 1966 the Beatles were more powerful than all the record shops in Britain put together. They could, and did, reshape the processes of the businesses. No matter how popular Beyoncé may be, she'll never be able to make YouTube or iTunes dance to her tune. She is merely furnishing a handful of the trillions of noughts and ones being ground out in their mills day and night.

YouTube and iTunes are just two of the brand names that were largely unknown 12 years ago but have now eclipsed all the record labels in all the world. It's similar elsewhere. The delivery mechanisms are the new stars.

March 2014

WebRTC

• Facebook file-sharing app Pipe moves from Flash to WebRTC 

• P2P streaming using data channels + DASH: demo.streamroot.io, live.streamroot.io

• 20+ new WebRTC vendors per month

• appear.in now does notifications (via a Chrome extension) when someone enters your room (such as appear.in/webrtc)

• File download with data channels: peer5.com/downloader/land.html

• Video call between Qt app and web app

• WebRTC Weekly #7

• New version of the editor's draft:
  Dated version: dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/archives/20140321/getusermedia.html
  Living document: dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/getusermedia.html

Media

• Downton Abbey Without the Hiccups – Buffer-Based Rate Adaptation for HTTP Video Streaming:

At first glance it seems video rate selection algorithms are forced into a tradeof. Requesting a higher video rate might lead to being overly aggressive and unnecessary rebuffering. On the other hand, requesting a lower video rate might under utilize the available capacity and lead to unnecessarily low video quality. 

In this paper we show that this is a false choice: neither of the situations should ever happen! We present a class of video rate selection algorithms that: (1) never unnecessarily rebuffer; and (2) are free to pick the highest possible video rate. Our algorithms achieve both objectives simultaneously by choosing a video rate based only on the current buffer occupancy, and avoid estimating bandwidth at all.

• Wikimedia votes no to MP4

And finally…
• hyperaud.io: transcript-oriented search, navigation and editing for audio and video 
• Netflix pact with Comcast
• Youku Tudou and China's online video scene: 400m viewers, less regulated than state-owned television
• Global recorded music industry revenues fell 4 per cent in 2013: 'The IFPI, the global music industry association that compiled the figures, said the 2013 decline was largely attributable to Japan, the world’s second-largest music market, where revenues fell 17 per cent. Excluding Japan, the global recorded music market was broadly flat, falling in value by 0.1 per cent. US revenues stabilised last year and Europe expanded for the first time in 13 years.'
• US Pay-TV operators lost more subscribers than they added for the first time last year
• Three-fifths of Britain's video, video games and music sales are now derived from the internet: 'Growing demand for streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify helped the UK home entertainment sector increase its revenues in 2013 for the first time in five years to £5.3bn ...'
• Yahoo planning more original content
• BSkyB to launch film download service
• Americans average five hours of TV per day, over 65 more than seven hours

February 2014

WebRTC
• Things to watch for in 2014 (from Dean Bubley, full report):
• Telcos following in Telefonica/Tokbox steps & launching or buying developer-centric cloud platforms. NTT has already done so recently
• A bunch of surprising DataChannel applications emerging that are totally orthogonal to the mass of videoconferencing and normal-ish VoIP use-cases
• Lots of vertical-specific applications, especially in healthcare, education, finance and general retail.
• The first full-scale WebRTC enterprise platfoms for UC and contact centres
• More big web players piling into WebRTC (Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn?). My money is on LinkedIn – how about recruitment video interviews directly on the website?
• WebRTC and advertising being blended somehow
• More non-browser WebRTC, especially in mobile. I'm expecting to see Android support aspects of WebRTC APIs natively in the OS.
• Tentative but unenthusiastic moves by Microsoft & Apple towards WebRTC as it gets standardised & a key HTML5 feature in browsers
• VP8/H264 getting resolved as either "both", "neither" or "who cares, anyway?" as everyone realises that transcoding is inevitable sometimes anyway
• Fragmentation occurs – but is manageable despite the complaints.
• M32 release notes:

• SCTP data channel interop between Chrome and Firefox
• Notification UI for screen capture
• Added stop() method to MediaStreamTrack
• Command line flag --disable-webrtc-encryption

• SkyWay WebRTC platform from NTT
• Bolo: snake game using data channels
• Marker tracking AR + WebGL + device orientation (also remembering Ilmari Heikkinen's excellent AR demo)
• WebRTC and Net Neutrality: will your ISP block or relegate WebRTC traffic?
• sharefest.me data channel file sharing now works between Firefox and Chrome, desktop and Android
• BitTorrent Sync 'cloudless' file sharing: getsync.com
• Chrome Bugs Allow Sites to Listen to Your Private Conversations: widely tweeted, posted and reported (New York Times, BBC, etc., but in reality works nothing like the screencast)
• WebRTC – a microbe in the world of HTML5: Chris Kranky article concerned at low awareness of WebRTC
• secretlymeet.me: create websites that only last for a browser session, share via WebRTC data channels
• iswebrtcreadyyet.com now has quality ratings from human reported feedback based on the last >1000 talky.io conversations. Perceived quality is higher for video than audio.
• 3D WebRTC!: Media Capture Depth Stream Extension
• WebRTC Weekly: news roundup from Tsahi Levent-Levi
• Android Opera 20 supports WebRTC

MSE
• Bye Bye prefix!

And finally...
• Content-Type and sniffing for video element in blink-dev discussion
• 1.4Tb/s broadband achieved between London and Ipswich using ‘flexible grid’ infrastructure bundling seven 200Gb/s channels (equivalent to 44 uncompressed HD films a second)
• Netflix subscriber numbers surge: now 44m subscribers, 'We plan later this year to embark on a substantial European expansion ...'
• There’s something rotten in the state of online video streaming
• Peter-Paul Koch summary of 2013 Q4 browser stats
• Avegant Glyph headset projects images on the retina
• Sony 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector

January 2014

Codecs
• HEVC for Twitter images:

An important feature of HEVC is its rich set of intra modes which makes it an attractive candidate for coding still images as well. It has been shown to reduce the bitrate by about 17% compared to H.264/AVC, 22% compared to JPEG 2000, 32% compared to JPEG XR, 34% compared to WebP and 44% compared to JPEG for the same visual quality.

• 4K VP9 YouTube demoed at CES

WebRTC
• EngineHere online coding school using Tokbox
• 7 Creative Uses of WebRTC's Data Channel
• clmtrackr JavaScript face tracking library: face substitution demo
• Augmented Reality demo: overlaying various types of content over video from getUserMedia()

Web Audio

• Quietnet chat program, built using pyaudio and Numpy

EME

• MPAA joins W3C
• EME 101 article draft on HTML5 Rocks

MSE

• Successfully transitioned to Candidate Recommendation status:
  w3.org/TR/2014/CR-media-source-20140109
  w3.org/blog/news/archives/3566

And finally…

• Chrome 32 released with tab indicators
• OpenCV ported to Google Chrome NaCl and PNaCl
• Google awarded nearly 2,000 patents in the US in 2013
• Intel launches gesture recognition camera/sensor for PCs
• UK entertainment spending rises with surge in film and music streaming:

After five years of decline, sales of entertainment products such as music, films and video games were growing again last year because of booming digital services such as Netflix and Spotify …

• ...but Internet streaming won't save music – the industry still relies on hits
• Tablet usage overtakes desktop for BBC iPlayer: 

On Boxing Day there were 2.2m iPlayer requests from tablets, compared to 2.1m from computers (1.6m from other mobile devices): 'during the festive period of 2012 tablet usage was typically less than half that of computer viewing on the iPlayer'. However, desktop numbers rose above tablet later in the holidays: 'New Year's Day was the iPlayer's best-ever day, with nearly 11m programme requests, as computers (2.91m viewing requests) stayed ahead of tablets (2.65m).'

• Beats Music streaming service (interesting phrase: 'It was designed first for the mobile, not a [web] browser.')
• Color film of London from 1927
• Visage JavaScript face tracking
• $699 4K Dell 28" monitor

December 2013

WebRTC
• getUserMedia() permissions will be sticky for HTTPS on Android from M33
• public-webrtc thread: screensharing will only be available from (Chrome) apps:

Screensharing is more dangerous than webcam access, because the attacker can record the screen, AND control what is displayed on it. It only takes one frame to capture sensitive information – far less than would be noticeable by a user. Requiring unambiguous opt-in for sharing, and being able to remotely disable bad actors, are therefore the best hope of security. To opt in, the user will need to install an app or extension, and when actually sharing, select the window/desktop to be shared from a consent box. Installing through an app store is an explicit grant of trust by the user to the application (similar to installing a desktop app). Visiting a web page is not.

• Are Facebook VoIP calls on Android Using WebRTC?
• Messaging with XMPP over WebSocket
• 87 Percent of Telecom Leaders Factor WebRTC into Product Roadmaps
• P2PXHR from Peer5 (who built sharefest.me): same interface as XHR but optionally attempts to get assets from peers before making normal XHR request
• The Evolving WebRTC Ecosystem
• Yahoo acquires PeerCDN

Media

• Add a resize event to video element for when the video changes dimensions: html5.org/r/8347

• Intent to Implement: Audio and video tracks
• Intent to Implement (shot down – see later comments): TTML, an XML format for captions and subtitles
• JavaScript HLS converter/player: github.com/RReverser/mpegts
• Cullen Jennings explanation of H.264 and IPR
• Daala video compression project

Web Audio

• Web MIDI now implemented for Windows in Chrome 33.

And finally...

• Intent to Implement: Improved NetInfo API

• Tab indicators
• W3C Highlights 2013:

'In the past year video-watching on mobile devices has doubled. This year in the US, the average time spent with digital media per day will surpass TV viewing. Viewing is no longer a passive act. In the US, 87% of entertainment consumers say they use at least one second-screen device while watching television. The increasingly social nature of viewing content is also driving commerce; television is a major catalyst for search. No surprise, then, that the television industry would look to lower costs of video distribution to the largest number of devices. HTML5 video is widely supported and new capabilities are on the way.'

• Netflix Declares Binge Watching is the New Normal

November 2013

WebRTC
• New gUM draft with some significant changes:
• Added output device enumeration to GetSources()
• Introduced the Constrainable interface
• Removed createObjectURL
• getMediaDevices()
• Cisco is open-sourcing their H.264 implementation:

• openh264.org
• Mozilla announcement
• Monty Montgomery
• Brendan Eich
• Hacker News
• Engadget
• GigaOM

• Citrix's first commercial WebRTC app Hutt
• Lots of discussion of using tracks instead of streams
• Make MediaStreams work with postMessage()?:
w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=22366
• WebRTC forecast

Web Audio

• SoundTrap collaborative music platform
• Audio Synthesis in JavaScript

And finally...
• !media: the internet via SMS
• Netflix ditches WebKit
• ft.com analysis of Time Warner: 'The monument to the worst merger in corporate history can be found at Columbus Circle in Manhattan'
• Online video in China:

• 'TV is useless now; fortunately, we still have computers'
– fengkuangdeshiziMisselva on Weibo
• 450m viewers online, 700m by 2016
• Lots of online shows get lots of viewers, e.g. Youku comedy 'Surprise' 260m
• 30% in Beijing watch TV, down from 70% in 2009
• TV highly regulated, online video less so
• Online video companies spending $164m this year making their own shows
• But… few firms profitable
• 'This year the number of people watching online video on their mobile devices has surged. Analysts expect the arrival of fourth-generation mobile networks to accelerate this trend. People who watch shows on mobile devices spend more time viewing, overall, than those on desktop PCs ...'

• OTT messaging:

• 40 billion messages in 2013, double SMS
• Platforms for media and web apps: not just about communication
• Line in Japan made $132m in Q2 from virtual stickers!
• WeChat, based in China, budgeted $200m for overseas marketing this year

October 2013

WebRTC

• Proposal: VP8 as RTCWEB Mandatory to Implement
• First WebRTC Facebook app, built using vLine
• Together.js: Mozilla JavaScript library to add collaboration to apps, uses WebRTC for audio chat, WebSocket for data sharing
• Media Capture and Streams: new editor's draft, Constrainable interface in next version
• GeckoView will support WebRTC
• uProxy announced (Chrome extension using WebRTC data channels to circumvent censorship/firewalls):

• uproxy.org
• youtu.be/ZJ6BuHL0EiQ
• mashable.com/2013/10/21/google-uproxy-internet-freedom
(Worth noting that quite a lot of commentary implies that uProxy will be used for snooping: 'More like a peer-to-peer gateway to the NSA.', etc.)

• SCTP data channels in Chrome 31 without a flag, which enables:

• Optional reliable transfer, e.g. for file sharing (though in fact this has been accomplished over RTP, the old protocol for RTCDataChannel, which in practice is actually pretty reliable)
• Binary data
• Built-in flow control (flow/congestion control is built into SCTP, and bandwidth is managed not capped)

• First live TV interview using WebRTC
• Vonage and WebRTC:

'We use iSAC and iLBC as our audio codecs and VP8 as our video codec to ensure the best quality on mobile devices while reducing transcoding on the backend. … We would love to see where WebRTC goes with mobile and integrate better with mobile devices. For instance, using the hardware implementation of the codecs that is available in the devices’ chipsets to provide higher quality media.'

EME
• Mozilla bug: request for pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM
• Brendan Eich blog post about EME
• Henri Sivonen: What is EME?
• NPAPI deprecation blog post: Silverlight, used by 15% of Chrome users, will be whitelisted, probably until NPAPI is removed (planned for Q4 2014)
• Tim Berners-Lee signs off on EME (EFF comment)

Media
• srcN Intent to Implement (13 October, arguments against):

<img src-1="(max-width: 400px) pic-small.jpg" src-2="(max-width: 1000px) pic-medium.jpg" src="pic-large.jpg">

• Discussion of enabling video for img elements, in Animated WebP Images: Intent to Ship
• WebVTT regions Intent to Implement (9 October)
• Mozilla Lossy Compressed Image Formats Study:

The data shows HEVC-MSP performing significantly better than JPEG and the other formats we tested. WebP and JPEG XR perform better than JPEG according to some quality scoring algorithms, but similarly or worse according to others.

• Snap.svg: The JavaScript SVG Library for the Modern Web
• The 10.8.5 camera driver for the recent version of the MacBook Air is 64-bit only, so any 32-bit app using the camera fails – including Skype, iMovie, Hangouts (and any app running on Chrome that uses getUserMedia()). Apple is fixing this.

Web Audio
• Questioning the current direction of the Web Audio API

And finally...
• Peer5 Kaltura P2P video
• Kindle Mayday: 24/7 customer support with video chat and screensharing. (Kindle HDX range includes 8.9" tablet with 2.2GHz quad-core, 339ppi display, rear-facing 8MP 1080p and front-facing 720p camera, 374g.)
• Wearable, speaking depth sensing camera for blind people: distance, colour and 'person-sensing'
• Stereoscopic 3D with CSS: just cross your eyes!
• Some people love image stabilisation but not everyone
• Radio is still the world's most popular form of media with listener figures at their highest levels in decades:

What irritates many people in the broadcast industry is a conviction that Apple, Pandora and other algorithm-driven music services are being misleading in their use of the word “radio”. 

“They’ve stolen our brand,” says James Cridland, a veteran of the UK radio industry who has helped the BBC and several commercial broadcasters develop their digital strategies. “A list of songs produced by a computer program is not radio,” he says, articulating a widely-held view. “Radio is something that gives you companionship, it surprises you, it gives you news.”

September 2013

WebRTC
• New draft of the WebRTC API has been published as TR Working Draft: w3.org/TR/webrtc
• Hardware decoding for WebRTC enabled on Chrome OS
• WebRTC for Web Devs event at SFHTML5
• 14 Google Developer Groups in 10 countries are running the WebRTC codelab from this week
• Firefox 24 on Android and desktop: WebRTC enabled by default

• Sharing files with RTCDataChannel

• Idea for WebRTC social networks

EME

• Intent to Ship on Android, 20 August: Encrypted Media Extension (EME) API with Widevine content decryption module (CDM) in Chrome for Android, to be launched in M31.
• Intent to Ship on Android, 20 August: same, but with ClearKey decryption, launched in M30.
VP9

Web Speech
• Speech recognition on Android: Intent to Ship

Web Audio

• Boris Smus's Sonic Socket

Media
• New Editor's Draft of MediaStream Image Capture API:

• getFrame() creates an ImageData object available in onframegrab handler
• takePhoto() creates a Blob available in onphoto handler

And finally...
• The Qt framework (for building cross-platform/device native and embedded apps, now owned by Digia) is moving from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine, based on Chromium: 'Multimedia and new HTML5 features such as WebRTC are working out-of the-box ....'
• Extracting a 3D object from a photograph
• Sony Smart Stick: $150 Android, plugs into TV MHL socket (no need for separate cable)
• Comments on NSA and encryption
• joinaspot.com: WebRTC video conference app with Chrome extension for notifications

• Streaming media is now profitable: 

The Recording Industry Association of America calculates that revenues from services including Spotify, Pandora and YouTube went from 3 per cent of industry revenues in 2007 to 15 per cent, or more than $1bn, in 2012. … What is lost from many calculations is the fact that the urge to own may be weaker in the age of streaming, but so is the urge to steal. Traffic to peer-to-peer file-sharing and torrent sites is declining where legal alternatives are offered. Netflix’s Ted Sarandos said in May: 'When we launch in a territory, the BitTorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows.'

• Scalable Video Coding deal with Vidyo
• Skype 3D
• VP8 HD hangouts
• 10bn Shazam tags (>100m per week, 54% from TV)
• IETF call for all web traffic to encrypted as a defence against mass surveillance

• HDMI 2.0: 18Gbps bandwidth, 60fps 4K, 32 channel audio, same connector and cable

• MPEG-DASH at the BBC:

The media is encoded a number of times at different bitrates. Each encoding is called a Representation. These are split into a number of Media Segments. The client plays a programme by requesting segments, in order, from a representation over HTTP. Representations can be grouped into Adaptation Sets of representations containing equivalent content. If the client wishes to change bitrate it can pick an alternative from the current adaption set and start requesting segments from that representation. Content is encoded in such a way to make this switching easy for the client to do. In addition to a number of media segments, a representation generally also has an Initialisation Segment. This can be thought of as a header, containing information about the encoding, frame sizes, etc. A client needs to obtain this for a given representation before consuming media segments from that representation.

Finally, there is also a Media Presentation Description (MPD), commonly referred to as the manifest. This documents the Adaptation Sets and Representations, together with durations and URLs.