Photographable TV: An Interactive Internet Live Broadcasting System with a High-Quality Snapshot Function

Current online video services distribute videos with a few hundred kilobits per second. The video quality on the Internet does not come up to TV quality yet. Although audiences often ask for high-quality video, it is difficult to improve the quality because of its huge video traffic. In this paper, we propose an Internet broadcast system with a high-quality snapshot function to improve user experience. The proposed system delivers low-quality video to audience. Meanwhile, it provides a high-quality snapshot function which enables the audience to take a snapshot of a desired and favorite scene anytime. We suppose the high-quality snapshot would improve audience's experience even if they were low-quality video because the data size of still picture is far small than that of video. To assess effectiveness of the proposed system, we designed and implemented a prototype system. This paper reports the effectiveness of the high-quality snapshot function in the Internet live broadcasting conducting preliminary and practical experiments.