The Interactive 360° Streaming Suite makes elements of 360° videos clickable and thus allows an interactive experience for the viewer. While the Cloud-based 360° Video Playout offers the optimal streaming solution by significantly reducing the required bitrate, the Interactive 360° Streaming Suite adds the storytelling feature to 360° videos.

The Interactive 360° Streaming Suite offers many options to the content creator to make an individual viewing experience possible and can be used on desktop as well as on mobile devices. It consists of a web based editor as well as cross-platform players (HbbTV, Web, mobile devices, HDMI sticks, etc.). The tool provides various pre-defined markers as well as customizable icons to tag different elements of the video to make them interactive. Markers can be sticked on static and moving elements in the video or on a fixed screen position.

Interaction elements allow for the dynamic display of overlays and supplementary information as well as to link to other video segments and resources.

The Cloud-based 360° Video Playout allows the viewing of high quality 360° videos on devices with constrained capabilities such as TV sets and HDMI stick devices. Usually the delivery of such video material consumes a large bitrate and results in a considerable processing load to perform the geometrical view projection and rendering. For example in order to achive a 4K FoV resolution, bit-rates of 200 – 300 Mbit/s is required to stream the complete 24K 360° video and it requires a few seconds to render the 4K FoV frame from the 24K equirectangular frames – which makes a smooth playback impossible even on modern devices with high processing and graphical computing capabilities. Field of View Adaptive Streaming addresses both aspects and reduces the required bit-rates and processing resources by rendering the field of view in the cloud in advance and by streaming only the selected field of view to the client. By doing so, many features which are applicable to classical videos can be also applied to the FOV videos for example: adaptive streaming using DASH and MSE, efficient delivery over existing CDNs and DRM Support over EME, and even Live Streaming scenarios. The solution also supports synchronization across multiple TVs and other devices (even mixed) so that a shared as well as an extended experience is possible.

Features and assets:

• Experience 24K/4K 360° videos on major TV Platforms (e.g. HbbTV, Android TV), Web, and mobile
• Support of Live and On-demand 360° Video Streaming
• Experience synchronized 360° videos shared on multiple TVs and companion devices
• Add user interaction to 360° videos with 360 VideoDirector Tool
• Efficient Delivery over existing CDNs using DASH and DRM Support over EME

The “FAMIUM DAI Service” is an end-to-end solution for ad-insertion in MPEG-DASH and HLS. The flexible chain consists of multiple micro services, that can easily be deployed and replaced and integrate well with existing components. Our solution wraps the complexity of the ad-insertion process into a simple, easy to understand, web-based management interface.

It supports different ways of ad insertion, namely server-based and client-based ad insertion. The service covers the latest MPEG-DASH ad-insertion techniques like XLink and DASH inline and inband events. Moreover, it has support for ad signaling mechanisms like SCTE35 and ad server standards like VAST, VPAID and VMAP. Our tools can be used to target different platforms, including HTML5 browser, HbbTV 1.5/2.0 devices and native DASH and HLS player running on Android, FireTV or Chromecast.

MPEG-SAND, specified in ISO/IEC 23009-5, defines standardized message formats for communication between server, client and network elements involved in the streaming process of MPEG-DASH. SAND-capable components are able to exchange real-time information of network and server components, as well as player behavior and performance data.

Fraunhofer FOKUS has implemented two libraries covering important parts of the SAND specification: The “SANDLibrary” provides tools for SAND metric reporting and the transport of status and PER messages. The library is implemented in JavaScript and integrates well with existing DASH players like dash.js, Shaka and hasplayer.js. The “SANDServer” is a Node.js-based SAND server to store metric reporting information in a database and handle the SAND shared resource allocation use case.

SAND metric reporting is an important tool for content providers as it enables players to provide streaming performance information like average throughput, buffer level, representation switch events and initial playout delay (QoE metrics defined in ISO/IEC 23009-1). SAND shared resource allocation allows network components to control how much bandwidth a client should use. This is useful in scenarios in which multiple DASH clients share the same network and compete for the available bandwidth (e.g in a stadium, train or airplane).

Keywords:

• Real-time metric reporting to monitor player performance information like average throughput, buffer level, representation switch events.
• Shared resource allocation allows fair bandwidth sharing of multiple DASH clients competing for bandwidth in the same network.
• MPEG-SAND (Server and Network Assisted DASH) defines standardized message formats for communication between server, client and network elements involved in the streaming process of MPEG-DASH.
• FOKUS libraries (SANDLibrary and SANDServer) cover SAND metric reporting and SAND shared resource allocation