Discuss resource selection

[defagos]

As an SRG SSR user I want to have the best possible stream when playing some content. As Pillarbox developers we want a common understanding of what resource should be played, given what we receive from the SRG SSR backend.

Acceptance criteria

• Current resource selection implementation has been discussed (comparison between current implementation).
• Dedicated alignment tasks have been created.

Hints

• Having the backend filter the resources so that all platforms have consistent behavior is an option.

Tasks

• [x] Discuss current implementations and their differences.
• [x] Discuss the case of missing resources (e.g. after start date has been reached).
• [x] Decide what to do and create dedicated tasks.

[defagos]

Discussed within the team.

Current status

• Platforms receive all resources, including those not playable on some platform (e.g. DASH on iOS or RTMP).
• Platforms currently are not too smart and basically consider streaming methods they support, filtering other resources that are not supported.
• Resources are not otherwise ordered in any way so for example if a livestream precedes a DVR resource it will be selected first.

Desired status and next steps

We want to keep things as simple as possible and to have the server decide. Thus:

• We must discuss with the backend teams whether it is possible to deliver resources based on the client (e.g. user agent) and to have the resource to be played returned first (e.g. DVR resources should probably be returned before their purely live counterpart). Currently SwissTXT livestreams are e.g. returned with their live-only resource before the DVR one.
• If this is accepted and implemented we can then remove any kind of filtering on clients and only consider the first returned resource.

Should clients later request more granular resource selection later we can either implement it client-side or discuss further selection parameters with the backend team