Behind closed doors at IBC 2025, a watershed moment was taking place in the tug-of-war between broadcast and streaming.
During an exclusive breakfast event at the Amsterdam tradeshow, the Ultra HD Forum announced plans to merge with the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA)—bringing together two technical video associations that on paper should be incompatible, not interoperable.
Yet the UHD Forum’s traditional broadcast wings have been clipped in recent years, as its members—OEMs, software vendors, R&D institutes, and their customers—have moved beyond defining UHD guidelines and onto the next best thing in video. For most, that is livestreaming, which is why the SVTA is a fitting home for the UHD Forum to be eased into retirement.
The merger marks an acceptance that UHD has flown the nest. Though the UHD landscape remains complex, UHD as a technology is no longer considered novel. The Forum’s job was to standardize formats, produce guidelines, and work on refinements—from camera to consumer—and the Forum can hold its head high that it has achieved that.
Things move fast. It was only April 2025 when the Ultra HD Forum announced long-awaited plans to merge with the UHD Alliance—an idea first proposed by Faultline back in 2018 when it was already apparent that both organizations were spending more time justifying their parallel existence than delivering unified progress for the UHD ecosystem.
So, less than six months later, the SVTA is actually absorbing two organizations in one. In turn, the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF, founded in 2011) became part of the SVTA in July 2024.
That merger had promised to continue the work of the DASH-IF which pioneered implementation of the DASH format in production environments. However, the current DASH-IF page on the SVTA website has been left to wither on the vine, with no ongoing projects and links to all five DASH-IF sub-groups displaying “The page you are looking for doesn’t exist”.
This doesn’t bode well for the future of the UHD Forum’s work.
In a statement, SVTA Chair Jason Thibeault wrote, “While the exact type of integration is yet to be determined (we imagine there will be some kind of top-level Working Group, something like “Content Quality and Production”, under which the UHDF, and perhaps other existing SVTA Working Groups, will be situated), the proverbial train has left the station.”
JT continued, “With the UHDF guidelines now part of the SVTA, we can leverage the larger SVTA member pool (which has many companies that live in both the broadcast and streaming world but were not members of the UHDF) to bring more technical expertise and insight to solving new technical challenges of content quality and production. We see the UHDF collaborating with other Working Groups in an effort to improve that interoperability and reduce the siloing which has been hurting our industry the past decades.”
Whether or not UHD Forum founders Comcast, Dolby, Harmonic, and LG will remain involved is unclear. All except LG are also members of the SVTA, which has 132 participating members companies on its books, as of writing.
By comparison, the UHD Forum has just 25 members. While the Forum is considered to have a more “broadcast-heavy” membership, there are no “traditional” broadcasters among the membership list, though it does include the NAB and EBU which collectively represent hundreds of broadcasters.
This suggests a misconception about the UHD Forum. Most of its membership is comprised of R&D software specialists like Fraunhofer, Interdigital, Xperi, Brightcove, Synamedia, and V-Nova.
UHD Forum’s mission was always about “promoting UHD adoption”— whether 4K, HDR, or next-gen audio. Broadcasters have mostly dragged their feet on UHD (outside of Japan, Korea, and a handful of sports events), instead sticking to HD because it’s cheaper to produce and distribute, meaning UHD never really delivered a ratings bump.
Playing devil’s advocate, we might argue that the UHD Forum was more about helping vendors create a coherent marketing and technology story to sell UHD technology to broadcasters, operators, and device makers. Broadcasters themselves have never seen much value in paying membership dues for guidelines they were never going to follow.
But what does the merger mean for features such as the Ultra HD Service Tracker? With 342 entries, the number of UHD services has grown 15% year on year, and could easily be left to rot if not updated regularly.
Faultline confirmed that while the SVTA is unsure of the future of the UHD Forum’s Service Tracker, it does plan to maintain it, and possibly identify ways to expand it. First, the SVTA needs to establish if anyone is actually using the tracker, and if so, identify how to create more industry value from it.
We have been saying for a decade that there are too many industry alliances, forums, and associations. It has long been clear that the industry would benefit from a pooling of resources between non-profits, instead of fragmentation, to better serve the common needs of both broadcast and streaming communities and to encourage broader participation.
With the latest merger, we have got exactly that, though it does mean the SVTA’s plate is fuller than ever. In the last few years, the SVTA has expanded from a torchbearer for Open Caching, to a central repository of documentation and global hub of working groups for all-things video.
It makes sense for others, like the CDN Alliance, to be absorbed next.