Re: Entertainment industry requirements for Web Standards

Hi Mark

Thanks for your interest in WebTVIG activities :)

I’d like to suggest that the entertainment industry should consider
requirements relating to multi-device timing.

I’ll give you a few use-case examples.

1) Watching a Netflix episode on the big screen, with the audio provided by
earbuds connected to the smartphone in your pocket.

Why would anyone want that? Lots of reasons really. Maybe you need to be
silent to not disturb the rest of your family, yet you really want to use
that big screen. Maybe you need to wander around a bit while watching. Or,
it could be accessibility. Grandmother might want to have some extra volume
without bothering the rest too much. Or, you could be doing the dishes in
the far end of the room. Maybe you’d want to have the french version while
your kids get the dubbed audio track. Or, it might be more technical -
synchronizing audio tracks delivered separate from the video would allow
users of many languages to use the same video resources, making for less
versions of a video file (with multi-audio tracks) and higher flexibility
for users (choose your local audio language even while abroad).

When presented with this scenario, people tend to think about intranet
solutions like Chromecast or SONOS or similar. However, there is a much
easier way of doing this, and that’s simply to do online sync. I.e., the
Netflix Webpage on the big screen would be synced with the Netflix Webpage
on your smartphone. You load the page and it’s synced. That’s it.

This is what the multi-device timing CG is all about. We are advocating the
importance of support for distributed timing and control in the Web, and we
are working on the standards/bug reports that are needed for this. As this
is currently not a primary concern for browser vendors it would be extra
nice to have someone from the entertainment industry actively pushing for
this. And, by the way, the above scenario is not something that might
become possible some time in the future. The Web is quite ready for this
already, it only takes some minor adjustments to ensure universal support.

Going back to the use cases. The fun really starts when you already have
multi-device timing, and you start to think about what you can do with it.

2) The Netflix Webpage always gives you the remote controls to whatever you
are watching, independent of which device is doing the playback and from
which device playback was started. The remote control also gives you the
ability to launch a synchronized secondary Webpage that is made
specifically for the program. It could be the other camera angle, the
parallel story, the context-sensitive infocards, or the time sensitive like
button. Of course, it could also be timed ads.

3) Your partner is travelling, yet even if he/she is someplace in a hotel
and you are at home, the two of you can still watch a few episodes
together. If you pause the show, his/hers will pause as well. Laughing at
the same time makes it feel like you are together.

Though these may appear as different use cases, they all depend on
multi-device timing.

The Multi-device Timing Community Group would welcome your interest and
participation.

Multi-device Timing Community Group www.w3.org/community/webtiming/

Timing Object Draft Spec webtiming.github.io/timingobject/

Timingsrc: Implementation of multi-device timing
webtiming.github.io/timingsrc/

Best regards,

Ingar Arntzen, Chair Multi-device Timing CG


2016-03-08 20:14 GMT+01:00 Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com>:

> All,
>
> I was asked to present to the W3C Advisory Committee in a couple of weeks
> about what requirements we (Netflix) and the entertainment industry
> generally have for future web standards.
>
> I confess to not having followed this group closely for a while and I
> would be happy to receive input from any of you on the areas you think
> require most attention in W3C.
>
> ...Mark
>