5G-MAG at MPEG/ITU Workshop: driving open-source development for faster technology deployment

The ITU-T SG21 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 (MPEG) joint workshop on "Media Streaming Services – What's next," held in Geneva, brought together industry leaders to discuss the future of media streaming and the challenges of technology deployment. 5G-MAG took part to make the case for a closer relationship between standards development and open-source software, to help shorten the path from written specification to real-world market adoption.

In his presentation, 5G-MAG Chair Frédéric Gabin addressed the usual lag between finishing a media technology standard and actually deploying it. Open-source development can turn a specification into a working prototype, but in practice it tends to only start once the spec is already final — leading different companies to duplicate the same prototyping work, testing that starts too late, and plugfests that end up as debugging sessions rather than real interoperability checks.

To close that gap, Gabin presented 5G-MAG's Media Connectivity Software Accelerator: an open-source development programme built to keep a continuous feedback loop running between drafting standards and shipping production-ready code, delivering open reference tools, testbeds and prototype applications for media and connectivity technologies along the way. Planning open-source projects alongside the standard itself, bringing developers in early, and building end-to-end demos all help the industry catch bugs while they're still cheap to fix — and get to market faster.

The workshop was also a chance to show some of what the programme has already delivered, with the Conversational Avatar Real-Time Communications project — already at its first MVP — as the highlight.

More information on the Media Connectivity Software Accelerator is available at developer.5g-mag.com.