Online – fixed and mobile – video consumption is soaring. Due to the increasing usage of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, for instance, current global mobile video traffic is estimated to amount to a staggering 4.4 million terabyte (or 4,400,000,000 gigabyte) per month.
While the industry has already realized major advances in domains such as video encoding, expanding networks’ broadband capacity and optimizing the underlying (video) content delivery network architectures, the massive amounts of video that are transported and consumed today inevitably lead to latency (i.e. signal delay) issues.
PRO-FLOW has led to the realization of the following three outcomes:
- A personalized delivery network (PDN) architecture to store users’ favorite video content from video-rich web portals as closely as possible to their physical location, and accelerate browser processing, to reduce signal delay
- A low-latency virtual classroom experience – with Internet video streams that automatically adapt to users’ individual network and device characteristics, leading to 20% bandwidth gains
- Low-latency bandwidth-efficient 360-degree video transformation
Within this project, IDLab-MEDIA contributed algorithms for low-delay live-streaming and techniques for fast encoding of 360-degree video content.
Project information
PRO-FLOW is an imec.icon research project. It ran from 01.01.2016 until 31.12.2017.
The research consortium
Industry partners:
- Androme
- Barco
- Nokia Bell Labs
- VRT
Research partners:
- Distrinet (imec – KU Leuven)
- IDLab (imec – UGent)
- EDM-IT (imec – UHasselt)
