W3C Strategic Highlights: Meeting Industry Needs (Media and Entertainment)

Media and Entertainment

(This post is part of a series recapping the October 2018 W3C Strategic Highlights. This post does not include significant updates since that report. For more recent news, please see the Media and Entertainment Interest Group home page.)

The Media and Entertainment Interest Group serves as a steering committee for media-related features that create immersive experiences on the Web and maintains the Media and Entertainment Road-map.

The group's current goals are to:

• Reinforce core media technologies:
  • Complete captioning profiles and other formats used for the representation of text synchronized with other timed media, like audio and video (TTML2, TTML-IMSC 1.1).
  • Better support linear content, notably ad-insertion in MSE. The incubation of a codec switching feature for MSE has started in the WICG.
  • Improve support for Media timed events.
  • Enhance color support (HDR, wide gamut).
• Reduce fragmentation:
  • Agree on a common and testable baseline for HTML5, in collaboration with CTA WAVE to help reduce the cost of producing content that works across a variety of devices. Since publication of the Web Media API last December, focus is on testing CE devices, and preparing a new annual release for the spec by the end of the year.
  • Improve Media Capabilities detection.
  • Improve capability detection for encrypted content.
• Create the future:
  • Bring XR headsets to the Web: the Immersive Web Community Group brought its WebXR Device API to the Recommendation track via the Immersive Web Working Group, launched late September.
  • Bring the power of GPUs to the Web, including in video processing. Also see discussions in the GPU for the Web Community Group.
  • Extend Media Capture for 3D cameras.

The Media and Entertainment Group was formed to provide a forum for media-related technical discussions to track progress of media features on the Web within W3C groups and use of Web technologies by external organizations, and to identify use cases and requirements that existing and/or new specifications need to meet to achieve a tighter support of media services on the Web.

If you are interested in the power of media and entertainment to become better on the web and to help create the future of technologies, please see the Media and Entertainment Interest Group page.