A proposal for a still picture Internet broadcasting system with dynamic picture quality adjustment based on audience requests for smartphone broadcasters

Abstract

3G Internet connections are required for Internet broadcasting with smartphones in outdoor where wireless LAN connections are unavailable. However, it is not easy for the smartphone users broadcast over due to lack of the 3G transmission speed for video streaming in real time. Cell phone carriers, furthermore, tend to shift flat-rate data services to pay-as-you-go data services. 3G data traffic on smartphones should be reduced. In this paper, we propose a still picture Internet broadcasting system with dynamic picture quality adjustment based on audience requests for smartphone broadcasters to achieve stable Internet broadcasting anywhere and optimize amount of data traffic. Since the required bit-rate of still pictures is much smaller than that of the video streaming, still picture Internet broadcasting can reduce data traffic. We introduce a scheme of dynamic picture quality adjustment based on audience requests so that the data traffic can be optimized. This paper reports the design and implementation of the proposed system on a Google's Android terminal. Furthermore, we show the result of an experiment on minimal picture quality.