Common Media Application Format: Everything you need to know

What is CMAF?

Common Media Application Format (CMAF) is a new-age, disruptive format used to streamline the end-to-end delivery of HTTP-based streaming content. The primary goal of CMAF is to provide a standardized streaming container for content owners or broadcasters to reduce streaming costs, lower latency, and eliminate workflow complexity when publishing linear media or on-demand content.

How does CMAF work?

CMAF uses a two-step process to simplify content delivery: Chunked Encoding: CMAF was developed to reduce latency. It essentially involves segmenting digital content into smaller, more manageable chunks having a fixed duration—which can be published without delays upon encoding. This helps content publishers accomplish near-real-time delivery of content.

File Encryption and Digital Rights Management: As more and more content is being published online, there is a need to protect the copyright holders' rights to prevent content from unauthorized access, distribution, and modification. CMAF effectively upholds encryption systems due to its support for most major DRMs (FairPlay, PlayReady, and Widevine).

Low latency CMAF

CMAF effectively eliminates latency issues and ensures speedy delivery of video content. Since video streams no longer have to be encoded and stored twice to facilitate adaptive bitrate streaming.

Why CMAF for video streaming?

Before CMAF was developed, Apple's HLS streaming protocol depended on the .ts (MPEG-TS) or MPEG container formats, while HTTP-based technologies like DASH relied on MP4 or .mp4 (fMP4). With the emergence of a standardized transport container and Common Encryption (CENC), Microsoft, Apple, and other industry players have now agreed to deliver content across the HLS and DASH protocols using the fragmented MP4 container only.

Advantages of CMAF streaming

Here's looking at the benefits of embracing a video streaming ecosystem that is CMAF-compliant:

Reduced costs- With media files being packaged in the same container formats, it significantly cuts down repackaging and CDN maintenance costs—thereby presenting a cost-effective solution to deliver streaming content.

Simplified workflow- Since CMAF allows common encryption (CENC), you needn't encrypt data more than once. Low latency- A key advantage of CMAF streaming is that video publishers can leverage chunked encoding to ensure speedy delivery of content.

Conclusion

CMAF has emerged as a game-changing technology in the streaming industry, given its ability to cut operational costs and boost content delivery speed.

Read more about CMAF, its advantages & how it works here: