Commercial Streaming Research Articles

Mapping audiovisual content providers and resources in Greece

In Greece, there are many audiovisual resources available on the Internet that interest scientists and the general public. Although freely available, finding such resources often becomes a challenging task, because they are hosted on scattered websites and in different types/formats. These websites usually offer limited search options; at the same time, there is no aggregation service for audiovisual resources, nor a national registry for such content. To meet this need, the Open AudioVisual Archives project was launched and the first step in its development is to create a dataset with open access audiovisual material. The current research creates such a dataset by applying specific selection criteria in terms of copyright and content, form/use and process/technical characteristics. The results reported in this paper show that libraries, archives, museums, universities, mass media organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations are the main types of providers, but the vast majority of resources are open courses offered by universities under the “Creative Commons” license. Providers have significant differences in terms of their collection management capabilities. Most of them do not own any kind of publishing infrastructure and use commercial streaming services, such as YouTube. In terms of metadata policy, most of the providers use application profiles instead of international metadata schemas.

From the extraordinary to the everyday: discourses on American quality serial television in Sweden’s leading newspapers and the breakthrough of streaming TV

ABSTRACT This essay explores discourses on American quality serial television in Sweden’s leading newspapers, and how a gradual discursive repositioning of quality TV – from the extraordinary to the everyday – is linked to Swedish television’s transition into a screen culture increasingly dominated by commercial streaming services. The analysis of the newspaper material shows that the campaign to legitimate quality serial television as respectable art subsided after 2012, to give way to a wider set of conceptualizations of the program form and its role in Swedish television culture. Although the newspaper press includes a range of perspectives, from celebratory approaches to on-demand culture to concerns over audience atomization and diminishing artistic distinction, it is also possible to discern a more general reversal of terms – from originality to sameness, from scarcity to plentitude, and from distinction to mediocrity – that discursively relocates American quality serial TV from the sphere of extraordinary art to the sphere of everyday commercial mass culture. This discursive shift reflects a redefined field for cultural criticism, but also reads as an index of a transformation of television culture in Sweden in the wake of the breakthrough of commercial streaming around 2012.

Post-Streaming Wastage Analysis – A Data Wastage Aware Framework in Mobile Video Streaming

Mobile video streaming is now ubiquitous among mobile users. This work investigates a less studied and yet significant problem in mobile video streaming – data wastage, i.e., some downloaded video data may not be played back but discarded by video players due to early departure or video skip, thus the bandwidth consumed in transferring them is wasted. Our measurements show that data wastage is significant in practice, e.g., 25.2 percent∼51.7 percent of video data downloaded are in fact wasted. Moreover, substantial data wastage exists not only in current commercial streaming platforms, but also in state-of-the-art adaptive streaming systems proposed in the literature. This work develops a new post-streaming wastage analysis (PSWA) framework to tackle this problem by converting existing adaptive streaming algorithms into data wastage aware versions. PSWA enables the streaming vendors to explicitly control the tradeoff between data wastage and quality-of-experience (QoE). Extensive evaluations show that PSWA can reduce data wastage significantly (e.g., 80 percent) without any adverse impact on QoE. Moreover, it has strong robustness to perform consistently across a wide range of networks. PSWA can be readily implemented into current streaming platforms, and thus offers a practical solution to data wastage for mobile streaming services.

University Music Students’ Choice of Music Listening Sources: Use of Library Resources as Compared with Non-Academic Streaming Services

ABSTRACT The rise of streaming services and decline of analog media have affected academic music libraries in their traditional role as a resource of listening materials. This study examines the listening-source preferences of college-level music students across multiple institutions through a survey in which students compared electronic commercial streaming services and both electronic and analog library multimedia collections to determine the factors that lead to the use of one source over the other. Findings indicate a strong preference for commercial streaming services over library materials, emphasizing the importance of convenience. However, the perceived quality of library materials remains high among participants.

Computational phonogram archiving

A general approach to analyzing audio files makes it possible to re-create the sound of ancient instruments, identify cross-cultural musical properties, and more.

Provincializing Spotify: Radio, algorithms and conviviality

Focusing on early experiments with algorithms and music streaming at WFMU, the longest-running US freeform radio station, and the Free Music Archive (FMA), a curated open music website, this article shows how commercial streaming services have been indebted to independent, open music infrastructures but have then erased and denied that history. The article ‘provincializes’ music streaming platforms such as Spotify by focusing not on their commercial aims but instead on the ‘convivial’, collaborative practices and spaces that their software engineers and users inhabited. I analyse an experimental national telephone broadcasting service at WFMU in 1989, an algorithmic WFMU radio stream ‘The Flaming Robot of Love’ during the Republican National Convention in 2004 and the ‘Free Music Archive Radio App’ that recommended tracks on the FMA website from 2011 to 2016. The app worked with an application programming interface (API) from Echo Nest. Echo Nests’ algorithmic recommendation engine also powers most commercial streaming services today. When Spotify purchased Echo Nest in 2014 and took the start-up’s open API offline in 2016, it engaged in ‘primitive accumulation’ of open-access knowledge and resources for commercial purposes. The FMA closed in 2019 and now only exists as a static site. As social institutions, however, WFMU and FMA ‘recomposed’ – adapted to a new medium and a new political context – collaborative engineering practices of the early broadcasting era. The article argues that moments of oppositional ‘conviviality’ in media culture such as the FMA should be analysed as elements of a continuous struggle.

The Changing Face of Academic Music Media Collections in Response to the Rise of Online Music Delivery

The evolution of online media delivery methods and the ubiquity of mobile devices has led to a shift in user preferences away from physical formats to freely accessible streaming content via sites like YouTube and Spotify and downloads from sites like iTunes. This progression has also resulted in content that libraries are precluded from owning due to prohibitive end-user license agreements. As a result, academic libraries must reexamine the role and objectives of their media collections as well as barriers to their use. This article presents the findings of a survey of North American music media selectors and provides a baseline context for the current and changing state of their collections and collecting habits. It finds that librarians are still actively collecting physical formats even though collection use is shrinking. In addition, they feel local pressures related to budgets, space, and preservation. Librarians have reservations about the costs and stability of commercial streaming products and what that means for creating unique collections. Respondents articulated numerous questions that the library profession should be asking itself and library patrons about the future of academic music media collections. Several possible approaches to these issues are put forth.

Adaptive Chunklets and AQM for Higher-Performance Content Streaming

Commercial streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube use proprietary HTTP-based adaptive streaming (HAS) techniques to deliver content to consumers worldwide. MPEG recently developed Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) as a unifying standard for HAS-based streaming. In DASH systems, streaming clients employ adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms to maximise user Quality of Experience (QoE) under variable network conditions. In a typical Internet-enabled home, video streams have to compete with diverse application flows for the last-mile Internet Service Provider (ISP) bottleneck capacity. Under such circumstances, ABR algorithms will only act upon the fraction of the network capacity that is available, leading to possible QoE degradation. We have previously explored chunklets as an approach orthogonal to ABR algorithms, which uses parallel connections for intra-video chunk retrieval. Chunklets effectively make more bandwidth available for ABR algorithms in the presence of cross-traffic, especially in environments where Active Queue Management (AQM) schemes such as Proportional Integral controller Enhanced (PIE) and FlowQueue-Controlled Delay (FQ-CoDel) are deployed. However, chunklets consume valuable server/middlebox resources which typically handle hundreds of thousands of requests/connections per second. In this article, we propose ‘adaptive chunklets’ -- a novel chunklet enhancement that dynamically tunes the number of concurrent connections. We demonstrate that the combination of adaptive chunklets and FQ-CoDel is the most effective strategy. Our experiments show that adaptive chunklets can reduce the number of connections by almost 30% and consume almost 8% less bandwidth than fixed chunklets while providing the same QoE.

Performance analysis of commercial audio video streaming product using metamaterial antenna

Performance analysis of commercial audio video streaming product using metamaterial antenna

General incremental sliding-window aggregation

Stream processing is gaining importance as more data becomes available in the form of continuous streams and companies compete to promptly extract insights from them. In such applications, sliding-window aggregation is a central operator, and incremental aggregation helps avoid the performance penalty of re-aggregating from scratch for each window change. This paper presents Reactive Aggregator (RA), a new framework for incremental sliding-window aggregation. RA is general in that it does not require aggregation functions to be invertible or commutative, and it does not require windows to be FIFO. We implemented RA as a drop-in replacement for the Aggregate operator of a commercial streaming engine. Given m updates on a window of size n , RA has an algorithmic complexity of O ( m + m log ( n/m )), rivaling the best prior algorithms for any m . Furthermore, RA's implementation minimizes overheads from allocation and pointer traversals by using a single flat array.

A scalable delivery solution and a pricing model for commercial video-on-demand systems with video advertisements

This paper presents a scalable delivery solution for commercial near on-demand video streaming systems with an associated pricing model. The proposed delivery solution combines the benefits of periodic broadcasting and stream merging, thereby enabling scalable video delivery. Video advertisements are delivered to the clients prior to viewing the requested videos. The revenues generated from the ads are used to subsidize the price of the requested videos. The pricing is determined based on the total ad viewing time. The proposed solution includes an efficient ad allocation scheme and a new constraint-based scheduling approach. In addition, the paper investigates how targeted advertisements can be efficiently supported. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of the overall solutions and analyze and compare the effectiveness of various scheduling policies and ad allocation alternatives in terms of several metrics, including client defection probability, average number of viewed ads per client, price, channel utilization, revenue, and profit.

A video-aware FEC-based unequal loss protection system for video streaming over RTP

A video-aware unequal loss protection (ULP) system for protecting RTP video streaming in bursty packet loss networks is proposed. Considering the relevance of the frame, the state of the channel, and the bitrate constraints of the protection bitstream, our algorithm selects in real time the most suitable frames to be protected through forward error protection (FEC) techniques. It benefits from a wise RTP encapsulation that allows working at a frame level without requiring any further process than that of parsing RTP headers. This makes our system straightforward and fast, perfectly suitable to be included in commercial video streaming servers. Simulation results show how our technique outperforms other proposed ULP schemes.

국내 포털사이트 음원서비스 취약점분석 및 대응방안 제안

Nowadays, the music industry is moving from analog to digital. Most of the big portal sites provide commercial online music streaming services. In this paper, we analyzed the security of the Korean commercial online music streaming services which are provided by the Korea's major portal sites(Dosirak, Cyworld, and Naver). We will show attacks on commercial online music streaming services that lead to an infringement of the copyright and we will also propose countermeasures for online commercial music streaming services.

Variable Time Scale Multimedia Streaming Over IP Networks

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of a variable time-scale streaming technique, VTSS, according to which rate changes are obtained by varying the inter-packet transmission interval, rather than altering, as in most cases, the source coding rate. Instead of constraining the transmitter to operate in real-time, the time scale of the packet scheduler can vary between zero, when the network is congested, to as faster than real-time as the channel bandwidth allows, when the network is lightly loaded. Although this approach is reportedly used in commercial streaming products, so far the technique has not yet been analyzed in a rigorous fashion, nor it has been compared to other state-of-the-art streaming techniques. This work first presents a theoretical analysis of the performance achievable by the VTSS approach, and it shows that, for the same channel conditions, VTSS yields a total distortion which is lower or, in the worst case, equal than the distortion of the standard real-time source-rate adaptive approach. A lower bound on receiver buffer size is also derived. Network simulations then analyze the performance of a TCP-friendly test implementation of VTSS compared with an ideal real-time source rate-adaptive technique, whose performance, being ideal, represents the upper bound of any transmission scheme based on source rate adaptation. The simulation results, also based on actual network traces, show that the VTSS approach delivers higher perceptual quality (up to 1.2 dB PSNR in the considered scenarios) and reduced video quality fluctuations (1.6 dB standard deviation PSNR, instead of 4.9 dB) for a wide range of standard video sequences. Perceptual quality evaluation by means of PVQM confirms such results. The gains, as expected, are even more pronounced (7.6 dB PSNR on average) if compared to real-time constant bit-rate video transmission.

Wireless Proxy

This article introduces a distributed system, called wireless proxy, to mitigate the effects of user mobility over streaming services on IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs). It argues that a handoff procedure totally controlled by the client, depending on client mobility and configuration, can have negative effects over streaming services. In this way, mobile clients that remain associated with their current access point (AP) in poor channel conditions, severely affect the performance of streaming services. The presented distributed system monitors client mobility and induces mobile client handoffs when channel conditions worsen. Also, the system compensates streaming client and server underestimations of channel conditions. The obtained improvements using wireless proxy are experimentally tested using one of the most extended commercial streaming platforms and off-the-shelf WiFi devices. The main contribution of the developed system is that it works with unmodified IEEE 802.11 wireless NICs and APs, such as the ones widely deployed nowadays.