Faced with gruesome scenes of consolidation, Faultline’s senses were tingling back at NAB 2024 that next in the firing line would be the many technical video associations formed to smooth adoption of streaming technologies – which have found their lives made more difficult by the very belt-tightening buccaneers that founded them. In what is potentially the first of many similar mergers, the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) has announced that it is swallowing up the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF). The mission is to create a group with tighter integration between DASH-IF, which has for 12 years been advocating for MPEG-DASH as the de facto standard for OTT video playback, contrasting with the SVTA’s more shotgun-spray approach to attacking challenges across…