Cloud-Based Interactive Video Streaming Service

A wide range of applications, from e-learning to natural disaster management are reliant on video streaming. Video streaming will construct more than 80% of the whole Internet traffic by 2019. Currently, video stream providers offer little or no interactive services on their streamed videos. Stream viewers, however, demand a wide variety of interactive services (e.g., dynamic video summarization or dynamic transcoding) on the streams. Taking into account the long tail access pattern to video streams, it is not feasible to pre-process all possible interactions for all video streams. Also, Processing them is also not feasible on energy- and compute-limited viewers' thin-clients. The proposed research provides a cloud-based video streaming engine that enables interactive video streaming. Interactive Video Streaming Engine (IVSE) is generic and video stream providers can customize it by defining their own interactive services, depending on their applications and their viewers' desires. The engine enacts the defined interactive services through on-demand processing of the video streams on potentially heterogeneous cloud services, in a cost-efficient manner, and with respect to stream viewers' QoS demands.