HTTP live streaming standard with HTML5

Question

What will be the standard for HTTP live streaming with HTML5?

Or what are the standards currently available? I know Apple HTTP streaming is one.

Answer 1

There is no accepted standard yet at time of writing.

Apple's HTTP Live Streaming is the best candidate. Because of the iPad/iPhone it now has considerable support from content encoders (see Wikipedia for list), and is also supported in the Android 4 Video Player (but apparently not in Chrome mobile). Apple have taken some steps to have it ratified as an IETF standard. A number of the Flash video players are now supporting HLS as well as RTMP streaming, so you only need to package your content once.

Microsoft's HTTP Smooth Streaming is similar, but in practice support only exists in Silverlight. Adobe also have a HTTP streaming format (HTTP Dynamic Streaming / 'San Jose' streaming), but this is only supported in Flash. Either of these could be supported in browsers, if the will was there. Both are probably doomed.

Alternatively the MPEG group are sponsoring MPEG-DASH, but one suspects in-the-field support for this is a way off.

Answer 2

It'll be one the HTTP adaptive streaming protocols.

As of 2015, there are two main protocols, HLS and DASH (four if you also count HDS and Smooth).

HLS has a wide adoption (see the 2015 report here: http://info.encoding.com/delivery-report-2015.html) but less features than DASH.

There are two DASH flavors: MPEG-DASH and WebM-DASH, the latter based on the open format which is a subset of Matroska.

DASH is gaining momentum and it has a good chance of becoming the next industry standard. The choice for HTML5 will take into account the supported codecs and their licensing terms. Since H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC are not free, WebM with VP8, VP9 has a better chance.

Image source: https://www.bitcodin.com/blog/2015/03/mpeg-dash-vs-apple-hls-vs-microsoft-smooth-streaming-vs-adobe-hds/