Spending "quality"' time with the web video

For consumers, watching video over the Web is the most popular way to access free and premium content on connected devices. The underlying technology -- HTTP adaptive streaming -- is straightforward; however, due to quality fluctuations, it doesn't always result in a pleasant viewer experience. This can lead to dissatisfied consumers, which then leads to revenue loss in both managed and unmanaged video services for providers. As a solution, the author discusses how the impact of quality fluctuations can be reduced if video content's natural variability is taken into consideration. Here, he outlines a number of requirements and summarizes the solution's steps. While this approach brings a new dimension to the current HTTP adaptive streaming paradigm, it also introduces a number of challenges that must be addressed for a production-grade solution. The author also details these challenges and establishes a roadmap for solutions

Adjusting content work flow infrastructures for HDR

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.This paper discusses what areas of a content workflow infrastructure are affected by integrating new high dynamic range (HDR) video formats into the system while also still continuing to process the standard dynamic range (SDR) format of the content. First, we present the history of SDR and what benefits HDR can bring. We then look at potential efficiencies in the capture-production-distribution domains where the HDR/SDR paths do not need to be separated and other places where they should be separated to avoid a potential loss in quality. Lastly, we discuss some of the HDR variants and how the infrastructure could handle dynamic metadata as it passes through the relevant workflow domains

Best papers of the 2016 ACM multimedia systems (MMSys) conference and workshop on network and operating system support for digital audio and video (NOSSDAV) 2016

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Are the streamingformat wars over?

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.An average US viewer watches some form of video content five hours a day. The majority ofthe viewed content is still broadcast (over the air, cable, IPTV or satellite), however, the share of the streaming content has been on the rise. In the past year, we witnessed some much needed convergence in the standards and the industry, and as a result of this, the forecast forstreaming services looks more promising than ever

Consumer communications and the next generation broadcast networks

Over 20 years ago the challenge for the communications community was the convergence between networking, telecommunication, and broadcasting. This challenge has been fairly well met, and we now note that around the world telco companies are being re-born as new hybrid telco-broadcast entities, and the reverse is true for many broadcasting corporations that provide Internet services in addition to their core business. Current and new infrastructure networks now face a number of major challenges that include increasing efficiency in the delivery of services from the installed or legacy systems, and an evolution path to address more topical concerns such as energy conservation and the increased heterogeneity in media, applications, and delivery systems. Central to all of these are the ever changing consumer communication habits and demands. These particular themes are addressed in this issue

Consumer communications and the next generation broadcast networks

Over 20 years ago the challenge for the communications community was the convergence between networking, telecommunication, and broadcasting. This challenge has been fairly well met, and we now note that around the world telco companies are being re-born as new hybrid telco-broadcast entities, and the reverse is true for many broadcasting corporations that provide Internet services in addition to their core business. Current and new infrastructure networks now face a number of major challenges that include increasing efficiency in the delivery of services from the installed or legacy systems, and an evolution path to address more topical concerns such as energy conservation and the increased heterogeneity in media, applications, and delivery systems. Central to all of these are the ever changing consumer communication habits and demands. These particular themes are addressed in this issue

Game Theory Based Bitrate Adaptation for Dash.Js Reference Player

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.Most existing DASH adaptive bitrate (ABR) schemes are designed to behave in their own self-interest and do not perform consistently in all network environments. In this work, we provide a practical implementation, materials and demonstration of a game theoretical ABR scheme, termed GTA [1], in the dash.js reference player. The GTA approach optimizes the viewer experience across multiple players without requiring explicit communication, and maintains a high playback bitrate while reducing startup delay, and minimizing quality switches and stalls.National Natural Science Foundation of China ; UAE Universit

SDNDASH: Improving QoE of HTTP Adaptive Streaming Using Software Defined Networking

HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is being adopted with increasing frequency and becoming the de-facto standard for video streaming. However, the client-driven, on-off adaptation behavior of HAS results in uneven bandwidth competition and this is exacerbated when a large number of clients share the same bottleneck network link and compete for the available bandwidth. With HAS each client independently strives to maximize its individual share of the available bandwidth, which leads to bandwidth competition and a decrease in end-user quality of experience (QoE). The competition causes scalability issues, which are quality instability, unfair bandwidth sharing and network resource underutilization. We propose a new software defined networking (SDN) based dynamic resource allocation and management architecture for HAS systems, which aims to alleviate these scalability issues and improve the per-client QoE. Our architecture manages and allocates the network resources dynamically for each client based on its expected QoE. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture significantly enhances scalability by improving per-client QoE by at least 30% and supporting up to 80% more clients with the same QoE compared to the conventional schemes.Singapore’s Ministry of Educatio

A distributed approach for bitrate selection in HTTP adaptive streaming

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.Past research has shown that concurrent HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) players behave selfishly and the resulting competition for shared resources leads to underutilization or oversubscription of the network, presentation quality instability and unfairness among the players, all of which adversely impact the viewer experience. While coordination among the players, as opposed to all being selfish, has its merits and may alleviate some of these issues. A fully distributed architecture is still desirable in many deployments and better reflects the design spirit of HAS. In this study, we focus on and propose a distributed bitrate adaptation scheme for HAS that borrows ideas from consensus and game theory frameworks. Experimental results show that the proposed distributed approach provides significant improvements in terms of viewer experience, presentation quality stability, fairness and network utilization, without using any explicit communication between the players.Suzhou Vocational University ; National University of Singapore ; National Natural Science Foundation of Chin

SDNHAS: An SDN-Enabled architecture to optimize qoe in http adaptive streaming

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is receiving much attention from both industry and academia as it has become the de facto approach to stream media content over the Internet. Recently, we proposed a streaming architecture called SDNDASH [1] to address HAS scalability issues including video instability, quality of experience (QoE) unfairness, and network resource underutilization, while maximizing per player QoE. While SDNDASH was a significant step forward, there were three unresolved limitations: 1) it did not scale well when the number of HAS players increased; 2) it generated communication overhead; and 3) it did not address client heterogeneity. These limitations could result in suboptimal decisions that led to viewer dissatisfaction. To that effect, we propose an enhanced intelligent streaming architecture, called SDNHAS, which leverages software defined networking (SDN) capabilities of assisting HAS players in making better adaptation decisions. This architecture accommodates large-scale deployments through a cluster-based mechanism, reduces communication overhead between the HAS players and SDN core, and allocates the network resources effectively in the presence of short- and long-term changes in the network.National Natural Science Foundation of China; National University of Singapore (Suzhou) Research Institute; Turk Telekomunikasyon A.S