Towards Bandwidth Efficient Adaptive Streaming of Omnidirectional Video over HTTP: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Real-time entertainment services such as streaming audiovisual content deployed over the open, unmanaged Internet account now for more than 70% during peak periods. More and more such bandwidth hungry applications and services are proposed like immersive media services such as virtual reality and, specifically omnidirectional/360-degree videos. The adaptive streaming of omnidirectional video over HTTP imposes an important challenge on today’s video delivery infrastructures which calls for dedicated, thoroughly designed techniques for content generation, delivery, and consumption. This paper describes the usage of tiles — as specified within modern video codecs such HEVC/H.265 and VP9 — enabling bandwidth efficient adaptive streaming of omnidirectional video over HTTP and we define various streaming strategies. Therefore, the parameters and characteristics of a dataset for omnidirectional video are proposed and exemplary instantiated to evaluate various aspects of such an ecosystem, namely bitrate overhead, bandwidth requirements, and quality aspects in terms of viewport PSNR. The results indicate bitrate savings from 40% (in a realistic scenario with recorded head movements from real users) up to 65% (in an ideal scenario with a centered/fixed viewport) and serve as a baseline and guidelines for advanced techniques including the outline of a research roadmap for the near future.