Showing posts with label aau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aau. Show all posts

Friday, December 14, 2018

Christian Doppler Research Association approves ATHENA project proposal

ATHENA stands for Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and Emerging Networked Multimedia Services and has been jointly proposed by the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC; http://itec.aau.at) at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (AAU) and Bitmovin GmbH (https://bitmovin.com) to address current and future research and deployment challenges of HTTP adaptive steaming (HAS) and emerging streaming methods.

AAU (ITEC) has been working on adaptive video streaming for more than a decade, has a proven record of successful research projects and publications in the field, and has been actively contributing to MPEG standardization for many years, including MPEG-DASH; Bitmovin is a video streaming software company founded by ITEC researchers in 2013 and has developed highly successful, global R&D and sales activities and a world-wide customer base since then. 

The aim of ATHENA is to research and develop novel paradigms, approaches, (prototype) tools and evaluation results for the areas (1) multimedia content provisioning (i.e., video coding), (2) content delivery (i.e., multimedia networking) and (3) content consumption (i.e., HAS player aspects) in the media delivery chain as well as for (4) end-to-end aspects, with a focus on, but not being limited to, HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS). The new approaches and insights are to enable Bitmovin to build innovative applications and services to account for the steadily increasing and changing multimedia traffic on the Internet.

The project has been approved by the Christian Doppler Research Association as a CD pilot laboratory -- the first such kind of project at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt -- with a duration of two years including a five year extension after successful review after the first two years (i.e., seven years in total). Thus, stay tuned for details and yes, I'm hiring PhD students for the areas above (detailed job description will be published soon).

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

AAU and Bitmovin presenting IEEE ICIP 2018

The IEEE International Conference in Image Processing (ICIP) is with more than 1,000 attendees one of the biggest conferences of the Signal Processing Society. At ICIP'18Anatoliy (AAU) and myself (AAU/Bitmovin) attended with the following presentations:

On Monday, October 8, I was on the panel of the Young Professional Networking Event (together with Amy Reibman and Sheila Hemami) sharing my experiences with all attendees. See one picture here.

On Tuesday, October 9, I presented at the Innovation Program talking about "Video Coding for Large-Scale HTTP Adaptive Streaming Deployments: State of the Art and Challenges Ahead".



On Wednesday, October 10, Anatoliy presented our joint AAU/Bitmovin paper about "A Practical Evaluation of Video Codecs for Large-Scale HTTP Adaptive Streaming Services". Abstract: The number of bandwidth-hungry applications and services is constantly growing. HTTP adaptive streaming of audio- visual content accounts for the majority of today’s internet traffic. Although the internet bandwidth increases also constantly, audio-visual compression technology is inevitable and we are currently facing the challenge to be confronted with multiple video codecs. This paper provides a practical evaluation of state of the art video codecs (i.e., AV1, AVC/libx264, HEVC/libx265, VP9/libvpx-vp9) for large- scale HTTP adaptive streaming services. In anticipation of the results, AV1 shows promising performance compared to established video codecs. Additionally, AV1 is intended to be royalty free making it worthwhile to be considered for large scale HTTP adaptive streaming services.


A Practical Evaluation of Video Codecs for Large-Scale HTTP Adaptive Streaming Services from Christian Timmerer

Acknowledgment: This work was supported in part by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under the Next Generation Video Streaming project “PROMETHEUS”.