fiestajetsam

Humming has all but mostly died within the IETF, and COVID played a notable part in killing it.

During the pandemic with all of the meetings being placed online, the video conferencing tooling messed around with different ways to recreate the hum and what is left today is something more akin to regular voting which sometimes can be janky and confusing with working group chairs having to iterate which option is an endorsement or rejection.

I don't think humming as a mechanism will be anything like it was five years ago, although physical attendance levels are (mostly) back and an on-going effort for remote participation to be more accessible - besides, the room humming isn't usually picked up well by the microphones. Unless it's fixed the working groups are going to be a little bit more awkward in getting consensus.

Apple TV and AirPlay doesn't support "out-of-band" of subtitles into playback or the use of a separate subtitle renderer, the subtitles have to be linked in the HLS manifest. For a lot of OTT platforms, subtitles are processed and handled separately from AV media, so this is difficult to fix. Some platforms work around this by doing manifest manipulation either server or device side, both have pitfalls.

WebRTC is not the future of low latency live streaming... at least not outside of video conferencing. It's incredibly complex as a specification, has limitations and numerous issues that set limits in how scalable it can be. Conversely, for HTTP segment based formats like HLS and DASH have limits due to their design (and that of HTTP) which set how low latency can actually go.

Where's the future? A likely candidate may come out of the "Media over QUIC" work in the IETF, which already has several straw man protocols in real world use (Meta's RUSH, Twitch's WARP). It'll be a few more years before we see a real successor, but whatever it is will likely be able to supersede both WebRTC and HLS/DASH where QUIC and/or WebTransport is available.