Enable Common Media Client Data (CMCD) support in Shaka player

[wilaw]

CMCD is a new standard that allows player clients to exchange mutually beneficial data with the CDN to allow the CDN to improve delivery performance and the publisher to retrieve real-time data about the health of their player population. It uses the media requests as the vehicle for transmitting the data. The specification is free to download and use. A working implementation by dash.js is available, as well as hls.js. A presentation on CMCD is available.

The request is for Shaka player to enable CMCD across your platform and browser matrix, with the following features:

• Have CMCD be default off
• Be able to activate it easily through single API call. This activation would turn on all available keys.
• Be able to apply a separate filter list to explicitly enable certain keys. Only keys whitelisted by the filter would be sent.
• Have an API method to enable setting the ContentID value and the RTP value, both as a fixed threshold and also as a multiple of encoded bitrate.
• Custom keys - accepting both a key and value arguments.

If you have questions or would like more information about which publishers are interested in deploying this and are gated by the lack of a player implementation, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Cheers
Will Law
Chair - CTA WAVE and CMCD Spec Editor

[joeyparrish]

Thanks, Will! No objections here. I appreciate your detailed requirements.

We would be happy to work with contributors on a plan for this and review PRs. The core team is currently occupied, though, so I can't promise any specific timeline in which we could implement this ourselves.