CMAF Industry Forum

The CMAF Industry Forum promotes the adoption of CMAF based on common codec media profiles, encryption modes and delivery mechanisms, supported by both the DASH and HLS adaptive streaming standards.

What is the Common Media Application Format (CMAF)?

There has been an explosive growth of Internet delivered video traffic, a growth predicted to continue for years to come. Multiple encoding formats, video streaming protocols and playback device types have presented the video industry with a profound interoperability problem.

Adaptive streaming technologies are used to deliver video efficiently over large, distributed HTTP networks such as the Internet. There are two popular adaptive streaming techniques in use today – HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH).

The Common Media Application Format (CMAF) is a container format that enables interoperability between HLS and DASH. It codifies and enhances what has become best practice for Internet video distribution.

What is the CMAF Industry Forum?

The CMAF Industry Forum (CMAF-IF) is a group focused on the challenges and advantages of broadening CMAF usage. CMAF-IF is an activity of the CTA WAVE Project.

CTA WAVE is a collaboration of media producers, distributors and device manufacturers focused on promoting Internet video interoperability.

Understanding that CMAF is critically important to the future of video interoperability, CTA WAVE created the CMAF Industry Forum to promote the global adoption of CMAF for use with the HLS and DASH streaming standards.


Mission

The CMAF Industry Forum promotes the global adoption of CMAF as the encoding format for Internet video distribution and as the basis for interoperability between the DASH and HLS adaptive streaming techniques. 

Goals

  • Promote CMAF adoption in media, infrastructure, software, and device manufacturing organizations.

  • Promote CMAF integration into relevant industry standards through collaboration with major standards development organizations.

  • Develop messaging that shows the value of interoperability, the role of CMAF in interoperability, and the central role of CMAF in the CTA WAVE interoperability project.

  • Promote interoperability between DASH and HLS based on CMAF.

Members

Members of the CMAF Industry Forum are members of the CTA WAVE Project who are eager to use CMAF to promote Internet video interoperability between the DASH and HLS adaptive streaming protocols. These include companies from across the Internet video ecosystem, including CDN providers, device manufacturers, OTT platform providers, codec developers and application developers.

To participate in the CMAF Industry Forum, join the CTA WAVE Project. Doing this will give you early access to specifications and white paper, but more importantly it will give you the opportunity to help set the future direction of interoperable Internet video encoding based on CMAF.

You can see the current membership of the CTA WAVE Project and contact us here.

CMAF provides the foundation for the interoperable, performant and efficient distribution of modern media.
Will Law Chief Architect, Media Cloud Engineering at Akamai Technologies

Calendar

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More about CMAF

Resources
Awareness & Adoption Survey