Optimizing IPTV video delivery using SVC spatial scalability

This paper focuses on two typical constraints present in current video delivery platforms such as IPTV: accommodating the diversity of consumer end-devices and coping with various bandwidth constraints of the deployed network access technologies. We propose the use of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC to cope with these two constraints: three different techniques to combine SD and HD versions of a video sequence in one SVC stream are presented and we assess how quality scalability compares to spatial scalability in producing video streams that can be tailored to various bandwidth constraints. The results show that the three proposed techniques for combining SD and HD perform equally good and that, under certain conditions, spatial scalability outperforms quality scalability to cope with various bandwidth constraints.