What a week. I’m mostly recovered from the last ~14 straight 12+ hour days. They were good days, exciting days, but long days.

In the rearview

The week started on a high note with FOMS @ Crunchyroll HQ. The Foundations of Open Media Standards is a long running un-conference for media engineers to collaboratively identify industry pain points and action items. It’s entirely volunteer organized and I took over as its steward a few years back. I prefer the term ‘steward’ over ‘organizer’ or similar because this conference has been organically growing and shaping for longer than I’ve been a professional developer – this was its 17th year. There were organizers before and will be organizers after me.

This year was an improvement over last and, with feedback in hand, I hope to take next year another step forward. Conversation topics were to be expected:

1. DRM is fundamentally broken
2. Legacy devices are no good
3. Interstitials are extremely good
4. We should stop implementing the same thing repeatedly.

Tuesday marked another trip down to Cupertino for the HLS Interest event at Apple’s new(ish) developer center. There were more presentations this year and less discussion, and, relative to last year’s Vision Pro announcements, ‘24 was less action packed. Apple employees are always well rehearsed, so, in some respects, it felt like a mini-WWDC for video proprietors.

Arguably my favorite presentation was from an English broadcaster about their sign language production and distribution experiments for flexible picture-in-picture placement.

Somehow we’re only half-way through the week. Demuxed this year was at the lovely Regency Ballroom. I wore two hats: speaker and organizer.

My role at Demuxed is usually ‘speaker wrangler’ and ‘greenroom helicopter’. This year, I was joined by a tremendous colleague and friend who shared some of the burden of climbing those ~3 flights of stairs from greenroom to stage. The Regency is a concert venue through and through – nothing makes you feel more punk rock than climbing those back stairs to the stage, past a tour bus waiting in the alley… to talk about PSSH boxes.

Speaking of which (I had to, I’m sorry. It’s been a long week) the scheduling committee had the foresight to schedule my talk in the third slot on Wednesday morning which gave me enough time to settle in, shake it out, and get back to my staff duties anxiety free.

Media Diet

Lets just say my media diet these last few weeks has been non-existent. I look forward to starting Metaphor: ReFantazio, I have a backlog of Antonioni films to work through, and I need to punch through the end of The Poetics of Space.

Looking Forward

I’m heading to VDD in a week. It’ll be my first time in Seoul so I’ll defer some post-Demuxed rest until I’m out-of-office and abroad.

Thank you to everyone’s kind words and encouragement. Demuxed and FOMS would be nothing without your enthusiasm and contributions. I’m off to coil and sort all of our cables. Until next time…

⏭️