HESP Alliance achieves important milestone for making HESP an IETF specification

As of today, the specification for the High Efficiency Streaming Protocol (HESP) is available as a draft informational via the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). One of the key objectives of the HESP Alliance is to promote and catalyze the adoption of HESP as next-generation video streaming standard for the Internet. While this process already started quite some time ago inside the HESP Alliance working groups, we now reached an important milestone in that process by making the HESP specification publicly available through the submission of an informational internet draft via the IETF.

HESP is a paradigm-shifting protocol for OTT video delivery, outperforming other video streaming technologies, to deliver upon the increasing demands of viewers and video services in this rapidly changing world. The specification contains information on how to create and deliver HESP streams to OTT devices. It covers the HESP basic concepts such as its minimalistic manifest and the use of two streams: the initialisation and continuation stream. HESP brings sub-second latency at scale over standard Internet infrastructure for real "high efficiency streaming” by video services. Furthermore, it brings additional advantages such as very fast zapping times, as low as 100ms, and improved ABR to viewers.

“I am very excited about this IETF informational specification”, said Samie Beheydt, Principal Engineer at Synamedia and a Director of the HESP Alliance. “Although a specification was already available for HESP Alliance members, this IETF informational specification further elaborates on certain topics, such as DRM, and hence further eases implementation. I am looking forward to feedback from the industry.”

“We have received many requests from leading industry vendors who would like to get access to the HESP specification over the last months, so I am very happy to achieve this important milestone” said Johan Vounckx, Vice President of Innovation at THEO Technologies and HESP Alliance Technical Working Group Chair. “As the specification is now public, it can also be consulted by all industry vendors and media companies who want to evaluate HESP. Licensing of the technology, however, is still provided for through the HESP Alliance.”

For more information on HESP or joining the HESP Alliance, please contact contact@hespalliance.org.