Announcement for a Joint Meeting on IPTV between MPEG and ITU-T Q.13/16

Announcement for a Joint Meeting on IPTV between MPEG and ITU-T Q.13/16 Saturday and Sunday, October 11-12, in Busan, Korea, collocated with the 86th MPEG meeting.

The purpose of this joint meeting, as stated in the liaison letter to ITU-T Q.13/16, w10090, at the last MPEG meeting, is to understand the ITU-T IPTV requirements and services scenarios, and to ensure that the three recommended MPEG technologies (BiFS, LASeR, and MXM) and any other MPEG technologies (such as those related to metadata, digital items and licenses) can, or can be profiled to, meet the ITU-T IPTV requirements and implement ITU-T IPTV service scenarios.

Schedule:
Saturday October 11, 10am-1pm and 2pm-5pm
Sunday October 12, 10am-1am

Location:
Same location as MPEG meets. Check with the registration desk for the meeting room information.

Note that Q.13/16 will have their own meeting on Friday October 10 and possibly Sunday October 12.

P2P-Next Project presents at IBC 2008 World's First video end-to-end streaming distribution of professional content to low-cost STB hardware

-- see also P2P-Next news

Amsterdam, 11 September 2008 - P2P-Next, a pan-European conglomerate of 21 industrial partners, media content providers and research institutions , is releasing its first version of NextShare, an Open Source P2P (Peer-to-Peer) video delivery platform today at IBC 2008. NextShareTV is a STB (Set-Top-Box) implementation of the NextShare content delivery platform running on a low-cost embedded hardware.

The P2P-Next research project has successfully released and tested the first Beta version of their P2P live streaming technology. This new technology allows everyone to broadcast a live stream, such as a Web cam feed or TV channel, to millions of Internet users. Key is the bandwidth efficiency of this technology, by expanding the proven BitTorrent protocol you can stream to thousands of people using roughly the same amount of bandwidth as for a single user..

NextShareTV is demonstrated at the IBC 2008 exhibition on the EBU Village (Hall 10 Both D21).

”This is an extremely ambitious project which will create a viable broadcast platform that would enable large audiences to stream and interact with live and on-demand (VoD) content via a set top box or a TV receiver. In addition, it is our intention to allow audiences to build communities around their favourite content via a fully personalized system. We are enthusiastic about the P2P-Next plans to test the P2P-Next system for major international broadcasting events, “ declares Lieven Vermaele, EBU Technical Director.

"The harnessing of Open Source P2P video streaming technology like NextShare by low-cost consumer electronics represents a sea change and an exciting opportunity for the market. Pioneer recognises that consumers are demanding greater choice and quality content on demand, together with integrated devices that are easy to use. The next step is to agree Open Standards for interoperability between CE peer devices across Europe.", says Mark Stuart of Pioneer Digital Design and Technical Director of the P2P-Next project.

George Wright of BBC, Creative Director of the P2P-Next project states: “The BBC is excited to be part of a world's first end-to-end streaming of live TV via a P2P network to a set top box using professional content at professional quality. Working with partners around Europe and content producers from the Public Service Broadcasters of European Broadcasting Union (EBU), commercial and microformat areas will allow a new distribution system to be tested, evaluated and assessed.”

The P2P-Next project will run over four years, and plans to conduct large-scale technical trials of new media applications running on a wide range of consumer devices

The project has an open approach towards sharing results. All core software technology will be available as open source, enabling new business models. P2P-Next will also address a number of outstanding challenges related to content delivery over the internet, including technical, legal, regulatory, security, business and commercial issues.”

P2P'08: Last day, the day after the social event...

Today, I'd like to report from the last day of P2P'08 (a.k.a. the day after the social event; follow me on twitter for some details) and also give some highlights from yesterday's keynote, industry session, and so on.

Yesterday's keynote from Anja Feldmann (Deutsche Telekom Laboratories) was about the relationship between ISPs and P2P, i.e., challenges and opportunities. In particular, there needs to be information exchanged between ISPs and P2P system which is a huge issue. In fact, the ISP does not want to provide information about their topology which would help to increase the performance of the P2P system. However, she proposed a compromise in a way that the P2P system shall provide a list of destination IPs (i.e., other peers to which a peer may connect) and the ISP returns a ranked list of destination IPs based on their topology. In this way locality is provided during peer selection without exposing the ISP's infrastructure details. Some people say that this might face scalability/complexity issues as such a query might easily include thousands of IPs. A paper about this can be found here.

From the industry session I'd like to pick up two talks and briefly summarize them. The first from Martin Stiemerling (NEC), "A Peer-to-Peer SIP System based on Service-Aware Transport Overlays", with the goal to provide a generic P2P and transport overlay system that is not bound to a certain usage (e.g., files, voice, video). In that sense the developed a Service-aware Adaptive Transport Overlay (SATO) which includes dynamic adaptation to changes (network, context). However, they only focus on voice and for IPTV it is a complexity issue of transcoding thousands of streams in parallel (no SVC used). This work has been done in the context of the Ambient Networks project. The second talk I'd like to mention was from Victor Souza (Ericsson) about "P2P traffic in ISP Network" that had a strong relationship to the keynote (see above). For live streaming they propose a time shift mechanism comprising content ingestion, content migration, content lookup, and content download. They have a prototype out there that allows for both VoD and live streaming. Furthermore, they propose to place media caches near the customer. However, there were strong doubts that this will be possible. Anyway, it is interestin to see that others have similar problems as we have and how they're trying to solve them.

Traditionally, P2P is about file sharing and has been extended to games, voice, audio, video (VoD, Live Streaming, IPTV) applications' space. At P2P'08 I've discovered some further application areas:

• P2P-based file system: IGOR File System, "The IGOR File System Demonstration" (Bernhard Amann, Benedikt Elser, Yaser Houri, Thomas Fuhrmann)
• P2P-based Wiki engine: Piki - A Peer-to-Peer based Wiki Engine (Patrick Mukherjee, Christof Leng, Andy Schürr)
• P2P-based power control system: "Towards P2P Technologies for the Control of Electrical Power Systems" (Kolja Eger, Christoph Gerdes, Sebnem Öztunali)

… it seems that becoming "P2P-based" becomes the (new) trend ;-)

Next year, the conference will take place in Seattle.

P2P'08: Engineering Peer-to-Peer Systems

"Engineering = Technology + Economics" H. Schulzrinne from Columbia University said when he opened his keynote at P2P'08 in Aachen, Germany. Well, I guess most of the scientists take care only about the former and ignore the latter. In his talk he clearly outlined the increase of energy and bandwidth consumption when using P2P systems. He also quantified that but, honestly, most of the numbers were related to the US and in Europe these numbers are probably lower. However, he concluded that from an economics' point of view "P2P system shall be deployed only in Alaska and Scandinavia (and only during Winter period)" ;-)

He then defined a P2P system as follows (see also figure on the left side): (1) peers act as client and server, (2) they provide computational/storage resources to other peers, and (3) they're self-organizing and scaling. The latest property is the most important one as (1) and (2) is also true for several proxies out there...

After that he discussed another topic that sounds curious but comes back to the energy issue as mentioned above...

Finally, he also presented some technical details - I hope the slides will be provided through the Web site - and he concluded that we "need more work on diagnostics and management", little work has been done related to services such as transcoding, and standardization is ongoing within IETF.

P2P'08: Video Search & Playback in Zero-Server P2P Systems

In yesterday's tutorial at P2P'08 I learned something about zero-server P2P systems, especially related to video search and playback. Unfortunately, the BBC guy did not show up and so the audience was directly confronted with the reality: standardization in DVB ;-) However, the speaker gave a good overview how P2P systems have been used in the past and especially about the trial for the European Song Contest. Next, we got input from the industry representing the consumer electronics. They want to put a P2P engine into a settop box and raised a few very interesting issues, mainly related to CPU and memory constraints (e.g., only 4 MB of free memory for metadata or so). Also, a timely standardozation is required in order to bring interoperable products on the market. The main part of the tutorial comprises an overview about Tribler, the P2P engine also used in P2P-Next project. One interesting talk was identifying the differences between traditional file sharing, VoD, and "live" streaming. However, I always wonder how muh "live" a P2P live video stream is? Just one keyword: delay!

More to come soon ...

Workshop Program: Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics

The program for the 2nd International Workshop on the Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics which is part of ACM Multimedia 2008 is available now. It seems that it will be a very interesting workshop. I'm looking forward seeing you in Vancouver in October...

8:30 - 10:00am – Keynote Talk: Dr. Alberto del Bimbo

Session Chair: William I. Grosky

Learning Ontology Rules for Semantic Video Annotation

Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Giuseppe Serra

10:00 - 10:30am – Coffee Break

10:30am- 12:00 – Session 1: Annotation: Ad-Hoc and Standards-Based

Session Chair: Farshad Fotouhi

Chants and Orcas: Semi-Automatic Tools for Audio Annotation and Analysis in Niche Domains

Steven Ness, Matthew Wright, Luis Gustavo Martins, George Tzanetakis

The Semantics of MPEG-21 Digital Items Revisited

Christian Timmerer, Maria Teresa Andrade, Pedro Carvalho, Davide Roagi, Giovanni Cordara

Multimedia Knowledge Management Using Ontologies

Antonio Penta, Antonio Picariello, Letizia Tanca

12:00 - 1:30pm – Lunch

1:30 - 3:00pm – Session 2: User-Based and Event Semantics

Session Chair: Giuseppe Amato

Affective Ranking of Movie Scenes Using Physiological Signals and Content Analysis

Mohammad Soleymani, Guillaume Chanel, Joep Kierkels, Thierry Pun

An Exploratory Study on Joint Analysis of Visual Classification in Narrow Domains and the Discriminative Power of Tags

Oge Marques, Mathias Lux

Spatio-Temporal Query for Multimedia Database

Sujal Wattamwar, Hiranmay Ghosh

3:00 - 3:30pm – Coffee Break

3:30 - 4:30pm – Session 3: Short Papers and Demos

Session Chair: Peter Stanchev

Employing a Photo’s Life Cycle for Multimedia Retrieval

Philipp Sandhaus, Susanne Boll

Use of Weighted Visual Terms for Machine Learning Techniques for Image Content Recognition Relying on MPEG-7 Visual Descriptors

Giuseppe Amato, Pasquale Savino

STreamingDay 2008, Sep. 2, Parma, Italy

At this year’s StreamingDay – kindly hosted by University of Parma – we saw a lot of interesting presentations related to video coding (AVC, reconfigurable coding, etc.), streaming, adaptation, cross-layer optimizations, peer-to-peer, robustness, and quality monitoring (see the final program for details). With this blog entry I’d like to briefly summarize the highlights of this event.

The first session was extremely hardware-oriented where they’re aiming at efficient multimedia implementations (i.e., mainly AVC encoding but also general purpose signal processing) for the ST240 VLIW processor. The overall goal is to allow for real-time encoding of HD (1080p) content which opens the door to a punch of applications.

The second session was dedicated to streaming, adaptation, and optimization issues. Michael presented our joint work (with ST) in this session (see picture). Overall, the feedback was quite good but the overhead issue is still omnipresent. In any case, the optimized reference software implementation (note: of SVC’s bitstream extractor) provides the lower boundary of what can be practically achieved.

The last session was related P2P, robustness, and quality monitoring. The P2P presentation was a good overview of P2P systems for live video streaming. In this work the authors proposed a combination of MDC and SVC for streaming of live video in P2P systems which results in higher coding efficiency and robustness but at which costs (performance and overhead)?

Conclusion: the STreamingDay is a very nice event organized by ST and related universities and you may hear a lot about the newest trends regarding streaming, coding, and applications, also from an industry perspective... hope to see you next year.