W3C/SMPTE Workshop Report: Professional Media Production on the Web

W3C is pleased to announce a report from the W3C/SMPTE Workshop on Professional Media Production on the Web, held online in October/November 2021.

This report contains a brief summary, collects highlights from the live sessions, links to the presentation videos, and details next steps.

The workshop connected the web platform and the professional media production communities and explored evolutions of the web platform to address professional media production requirements. 24 workshop talks were published in October 2021, about 40 issues were discussed online, and 3 live sessions were held mid-November 2021 that convened more than 75 experts to exchange on specific media production needs for the web platform.

The main outcomes are that:

• The web platform already provides building blocks to enable core media production scenarios.
• These building blocks are not powerful enough to create full-fledged experiences on client devices.
• Most of the gaps raised during the workshop touch on API features in specifications that are already being developed. There is however benefit to coordinating effort to make sure that media production needs are correctly captured and addressed in ongoing standardization activities.

Workshop discussions call for a more in-depth analysis of some of the topics, and workshop participants propose the creation of a Media Production Task Force that the Media & Entertainment Interest Group could host. The Task Force would be scoped to professional media production using the web platform, and responsible for documenting use cases and needs specific to professional media production, quantifying performance issues, promoting proposals to working groups and implementers, and tracking standardization progress and implementations. Workshop organizers are working with workshop participants and Media & Entertainment Interest Group chairs to facilitate the creation of the task force.

W3C thanks our sponsor, Adobe, the Program Committee, workshop speakers, SMPTE, and all participants for making this event possible.