Functionalities and costs of scalable video coding for streaming services

Abstract

Functionalities and costs of scalable video coding techniques are analyzed for streaming services. Temporal, spatial and amplitude scalability, and combinations of them, are considered. Functionalities are: reduction of netload for multicast transmission; reduction of the server storage capacity; graceful degradation in case of transmission errors. Costs are: an increase of netload for unicast transmission; an increase of computational expense in the decoder. The result is that presently only temporal scalability has acceptable costs. Costs of known spatial scalability techniques are too large to be economically attractive. If costs of amplitude scalability can be reduced by future research, the use of this technique combined with temporal scalability will allow improved functionalities.