Unified Streaming’s research and development cadre traveled and pumped out presentations and projects this past year.

Let’s glance back at the R&D team’s trips and tricks in 2025. (And at the end, we’ll clue you into what’s in store for 2026.)

Raad kept it local for MPEG 149

MPEG, the consortium of media standardization developers and experts, gathered in Geneva on January 20 for its 149th meeting. Mohamad Raad, Unified Streaming’s standardization envoy, could not attend in person. So he joined online.

Exploring media authenticity and provenance was a big topic. Raad noted that significant industry support for the C2PA specification had grown.

Valentijn’s days in Denver: Mile-High Video

My friends, there’s an annual USA-based conference for video streaming coders, R&D engineers, and industry bigwigs out there, and it’s called Mile-High Video.

Unified Streaming Solutions Engineer Valentijn Siebrands flew to frozen Denver to give a presentation on February 18, 2025, the first day of the gathering.

Titled Evaluation Framework for Reducing Media Start Delay using CMSD, the presentation showed how to optimize player performance in order to speed up a stream’s start-up time. 

Unified Streaming’s Jamie Fletcher, Roberto Ramos-Chavez, Ksenia Rabinovich, and Arjen Wagenaar, plus Varnish Software’s Espen Braastad, collaborated on it. Siebrands presented on their behalf.

Munich hosted DVB World

Mohamad Raad traveled to southern Germany mid-March to attend DVB World. 

One topic that got traction there, Raad reported, was DVB-I, a “technical specification for an internet-centric way to signal and discover television services, whether they are delivered over broadband or broadcast.”

Raad said he appreciates the way DVB approaches standardization, and characterized it as “the discipline of tying technical decisions to commercial requirements.”

Berlin in June: not hard to ‍FOKUS

In June, Senior R&D Engineer Roberto Ramos-Chavez and Siebrands traveled to Berlin to attend Fraunhofer’s 12th FOKUS Media Web Symposium. There, Ramos-Chavez presented “Evaluation Framework for Optimizing Live Streaming Latency Using Common Media Server Data.” (Unified cofounder and CTO Arjen Wagenaar and Staff Engineer Mark Ogle also worked on the document.) Unified also presented a C2PA PoC (proof of concept) at FOKUS this year.

With Castlabs’s Thasso Griebel, Siebrands presented on high-frequency key rotation, a streaming anti-piracy approach.

MPEG 151: destination Daejeon 

Hosted in person in Daejeon, South Korea, with online participation, MPEG 151 featured two significant topics: the gap analysis for media authenticity standards, and the next generation of video codecs. Raad attended June 30–July 4 and, in conjunction with his working group, he submitted a gap analysis about media provenance and authenticity in ISO/IEC standards.

MPEG 152 chaired in Geneva

October 7–11, 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland, Raad attended MPEG 152, and took photos of two chairs in the brutalist building where the conference took place. Above is one of the chairs.

“We contributed our vision for the provenance and authenticity workflows during this meeting,” said Raad.

December: lemme at that Emmy

Capping off a busy year, in early December Arjen Wagenaar and Dirk Griffioen celebrated with a win. With former colleague Rufael Mekuria, the cofounders of Unified Streaming attended the 76th annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards gala in New York.

The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences honored MPEG (and its many contributors including Wagenaar, Griffioen, and Mekuria) for developing and standardizing CMAF (Common Media Application Format). That’s the format the streaming industry favors for widespread interoperability.

2026: full docket for R&D

Looking back, 2025 kept its focus on and made progress in scalability as well as provenance and authenticity. Standardization groups demonstrated large-scale live streaming deployments and developed the ability to identify the origin of streamed content, even when live.

So what’s ahead?

Like this past year, the new one promises the full slate of MPEG meetings and other standardization gatherings.

Unified Streaming could be represented in Denver again at Mile-High Video 2026. Confirmation of attendance is forthcoming.

Raad believes that the next dozen months will focus on integrating AI into multimedia workflows in a safer and more productive manner. Provenance and authenticity technology like C2PA will play an important role in achieving this goal.

“There is no going back when it comes to integrating AI tools into media workflows,” said Raad. “However, it is important to ensure that, where AI is used to generate or tailor content, the origins of that content can be easily ascertained.”

Raad thinks that “implementation and deployment will be key” for C2PA in 2026.

The specification covers the most popular media types and workflows, but the uptake of C2PA still heavily depends on implementers understanding the specification, as well as service and product providers deploying the standard.

Research plows ahead‍

Unified Streaming is known not only for providing stable, trustworthy software, but also for displaying an outsized influence in research and standardization. For more information on Unified’s research work, please visit our research page or get in touch.