An open protocol for video — humans 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 humans 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 human-read docs required.
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 video transports live behind it. Ingest from anywhere, deliver everywhere, and let agents negotiate access over HTTP.
Ingest
Delivery
Audio over IP
Agent & web
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.