In April 2022, Nokia inventors - together with their standardization partners - won a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for the standardization of HTTP encapsulated protocols, which are used for streaming over HTTP. Find out more about what it means and why it’s important!

Emre Aksu, Miska Hannuksela and Kashyap Kammachi Sreedhar celebrate Emmy® Awards from 2021 and 2022. Other members of the awarded Nokia team in 2022 are Igor Curcio and Lukasz Kondrad.

In April 2022, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) held the 73rd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards ceremony in honor of those who have contributed to breakthroughs in broadcasting technologies. 

One of the 2022 winners was the standardization of HTTP encapsulated protocols, which enable streaming over the Internet. Among the awardees is the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) who have developed the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard, also known as MPEG-DASH. The media streaming industry has widely adopted the MPEG-DASH standard which has become fundamental to the interoperability of today’s video streaming services. For example, every time you watch YouTube or Netflix, you are using DASH!

Currently the MPEG-DASH standardization takes place under the MPEG Systems Working Group of the Sub-Committee 29 of ISO/IEC JTC1. Nokia is one of the recognized standardization partners for DASH and among the recipients of the Emmy statuettes granted to MPEG.

Last week, the statuette finally reached Nokia’s offices in Finland. This great achievement gloriously substantiates the importance that Nokia’s team, including past Nokia team members, has had in the MPEG-DASH standardization. 

Short course on DASH

A key design choice in DASH is to re-use the existing web architecture and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This makes DASH scalable to a massive number of concurrent users without the need to update server or network infrastructure. Furthermore, thanks to the use of HTTP, DASH avoids issues with bypassing firewalls unlike earlier video streaming approaches. Since network conditions may vary from time to time, DASH includes the capability to adapt to different media bitrates.

The formats specified in the DASH standard include Media Presentation Description (MPD) and segment formats. Based on the MPD, the media player application selects and adapts the video content to be streamed. Segment formats specify how compressed audio and video content is carried over HTTP. DASH specifies segment formats based on the ISO Base Media File Format, another Emmy-award-winning technology, for which Nokia has been recognized.

Fifth Emmy® Award for Nokia’s contribution to video research and standardization

Over the years Nokia’s inventors have been recognized with a total of eight Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards. Five of the eight have been received for our work with our partners in the field of video research and standardization.

The first three of these five Emmys were granted for the standardization of the Advanced Video Coding (AVC/H.264) and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) standards. The fourth was achieved in 2021 for the standardization of the ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF), which is a globally adopted standard for media storage and streaming.

For over thirty years, Nokia has been innovating the technologies that enable audio and video to be transported across communications networks. And during that period, our contribution to video, audio and media systems standards has been instrumental. These standards enable seamless interoperability between devices and services, enabling us to create, consume and share multimedia content. Now, in the advent of the metaverse(s), content is becoming more complex than ever, posing unique demands on multimedia distribution. At Nokia, we keep innovating to meet these challenges and make the vision of the metaverse(s) a reality.