Tile-Based Streaming is set to play a major role in delivering VR and 360 video to mainstream audiences by reducing bandwidth requirements, reducing costs and vastly increasing accessibility.
Bitmovin engineers and co-founders Mario Graf (@grafmar_io), Christian Timmerer (@timse7), and Christopher Mueller (@chris_bitmovin) have been awarded the Excellence in DASH Award at ACM Multimedia Systems 2017 in Taipei, Taiwan.
The Bitmovin team receives the third place award for their paper “Towards Bandwidth Efficient Adaptive Streaming of Omnidirectional Video over HTTP: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation” [PDF], [Session Slides]. In this paper, the researchers analyze adaptive bitrate streaming of VR and 360-degree video over HTTP and describe the use of tiles, as specified within modern video codecs, such HEVC/H.265 and VP9, to recognize bitrate savings of 40-65%.
These findings establish a baseline for advanced streaming techniques of immersive video, such as VR and 360-degree video, including real-life applications and the outline of the research roadmap. Bitmovin is committed to shaping the future of online video and building streaming solutions for commercial applications that enhance end-user experience and reduce friction for video developers. You can learn more about Bitmovin end-to-end support for immersive video in this tutorial – VR & 360° Video and Adaptive Bitrate Streaming.
The award is established by the DASH Industry Forum. The DASH-IF “creates interoperability guidelines on the usage of the MPEG-DASH streaming standard, promotes and catalyze the adoption of MPEG-DASH and help transition it from a specification into a real business. It consists of the major streaming and media companies, such as Microsoft, Netflix, Google, Ericsson, Samsung and Adobe.” Bitmovin was among the first to deploy DASH in accordance with the DASH-IF open standard guidelines. We are an active member of the DASH-IF and actively contribute research and testing data to the DASH community.
What and Why is Tile Based Streaming?
The nature of 360 video creates much larger files sizes simply due to the extra pixels required for a spherical image. But many of these pixels delivered in the video stream are outside of the viewport and are never seen. This causes unnecessarily high bandwidth requirements and CDN costs.
Tile based streaming is a revolutionary technique that solves this problem by breaking a 360° video into “tiles”, and streams the highest quality only to visible sections of the video. At the same time it uses lower quality (smaller) files for unseen tiles.
This technique will be among the next major innovations in the area of 360 & VR video, and will offer huge cost savings and quality improvements, and Bitmovin is leading the way towards making this technology available for commercial applications.
To see tile-based streaming in action, request a demo with our video solutions experts.
