This paper reviews the history of this standard’s creation, explains its operation principles, and discusses its various features, utilities, and benefits.

Abstract

Content Steering for DASH (ETSI TS 103 998) is a new standard developed by the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF), defining means for managing media delivery using multiple CDNs. At the server-client interaction level, this standard is compatible with the CDN steering features of HLS (IETF RFC 8216bis), effectively enabling the same content steering servers to control delivery for both HLS and DASH distributions. This paper reviews the history of this standard’s creation, explains its operation principles, and discusses its various features, utilities, and benefits. The paper also surveys the available implementations of streaming clients and servers supporting this standard and the ongoing efforts in DASH-IF and Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) organizations to support the rollout of this technology in the industry. Finally, the paper presents the results of an experimental study of multi-CDN delivery systems conducted by SVTA. These results show significant QOE improvements achieved by a system using content steering.

Introduction

As well known, most videos sent over the Internet are delivered using streaming technologies [1-6]. The two most commonly used streaming protocols today are HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) [7] and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) [8]. Both are international standards. Both use HTTP as the underlying network protocol and employ Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for distribution [9,10].

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