Video streaming using light-weight transcoding and in-network intelligence

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, LwTE, which reduces streaming costs in HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) by enabling light-weight transcoding at the edge. In LwTE, during encoding of a video segment in the origin server, a metadata is generated which stores the optimal encoding decisions. LwTE enables us to store only the highest bitrate plus corresponding metadata (of very small size) for unpopular video segments/bitrates. Since metadata is of very small size, replacing unpopular video segments/bitrates with their metadata results in considerable saving in the storage costs. The metadata is reused at the edge servers to reduce the required time and computational resources for on-the-fly transcoding.