An open protocol for video — people and agents on the same rails.
WAVE is a published, versioned contract for live and on-demand video. Integrate once against one API; autonomous agents negotiate and settle for media access natively over HTTP-402. The surfaces below are the protocol — documented, discoverable, and implementable.
The protocol surfaces
OpenAPI contract
One typed API contract for every WAVE product. Generate a client in any language; the same contract serves people and agents.
HTTP-402 payment negotiation (x402)
Resources can demand payment with an HTTP 402 response; agents settle programmatically and retry. Discovery lives at /.well-known/x402; enforcement is at the WAVE gateway.
Agent skill descriptors
Machine-readable skill manifests let autonomous systems discover what WAVE can do and how to call it — no docs to read.
Agent commerce (x402 + MPP)
Every WAVE capability is payable by an autonomous agent over HTTP-402 (x402) and the Machine Payments Protocol — Base mainnet settlement, sanctions screening, pay-per-use, no account. wave Dispatch (edge AI inference) is the first live service proving the rails.
Gateway enforcement plane
Authentication, scope, entitlement, and metering are enforced at a single edge gateway. Every product and every agent goes through the same plane — the protocol's trust boundary.
What WAVE speaks
One API in front; the full media stack behind it. Ingest from anywhere, deliver everywhere, protect it, caption it, and let agents negotiate access over HTTP.
Captions & metadata
Content protection
Agent & API
On the roadmap
WAVE is an open protocol in the sense that the contract is published, versioned, and implementable against the surfaces above. It is not an independently ratified standards-body specification, and it does not claim multiple third-party implementations. The protocol is operated by WAVE Online LLC.