Unified Streaming wins Emmy Award for contribution to CMAF standardization

News

9/12/2025

Unified Streaming wins Emmy Award for contribution to CMAF standardization

In New York City, on Thursday Dec 4, 2025, Unified Streaming cofounders Dirk Griffioen and Arjen Wagenaar and their former colleague Rufael Mekuria attended the 76th annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards gala.

Among many other individuals and companies, Unified Streaming contributed to the standardization of CMAF (Common Media Application Format), which was orchestrated and published by MPEG, or Moving Picture Experts Group.

Why CMAF?

Standardizing CMAF was a whole process. Why come up with it? Why go through with it? Why’s it matter?

Well, before CMAF, in terms of container formats they supported, various platforms were siloed. Content distributors had to encode and store the same video content two different ways. Apple’s HLS used the MPEG transport stream format, and MPEG-DASH and Microsoft Smooth Streaming did not. Instead, they used fragmented MP4s, or fMP4.

The lack of a common standard meant high costs for packaging video files, storing them, and requiring content delivery networks (CDNs) to cache two copies of each file.

CMAF promised to work across the entire industry, and to improve interoperability for media companies and devices around the world. And it has done so. The standard has achieved widespread adoption.

Based on the 2021 Tech & Engineering Emmy Award-winning ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) standard, the unifying solution CMAF succeeded in defining how to construct fragmented media objects for large-scale video distribution over the internet.

Since its publication, the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF) has developed further guidelines, too, such as best practices for low-latency best practices.

The single, standardized container format can be deployed by both HLS- and MPEG-DASH-based workflows. Since it simplifies those workflows and enables features like low-latency streaming, CMAF serves as the streaming industry’s standard format.

Bits of history: CMAF standardization

Creating the format began with a collaboration between Apple and Microsoft in February 2016.

To undo market division, in February 2016 representatives from Apple and Microsoft pitched CMAF to the MPEG standards body.

Apple then added support for the fragmented MP4 (fMP4) format, the foundation for CMAF, to its HLS specification.

By July 2017 the co-developers and the MPEG group had hammered out all the specifications for CMAF. A half year later, in January 2018, the CMAF standard was officially published as ISO/IEC 23000-19:2018.

Quote from an insider

Unified Streaming Standardization Representative Mohamad Raad, who works in several working groups at MPEG, said “CMAF is one of those rare standards that are immediately useful and continue to be useful years after being published. The MPEG systems working group and its leadership did a great service to the streaming industry by developing this standard. The Emmy is well deserved.”