Energy-Efficient Video Streaming: Open-Source Tools, Datasets, and Solutions
Abstract: Energy efficiency has become a crucial aspect of today’s IT infrastructures, and video (streaming) accounts for over half of today’s Internet traffic. This column highlights open-source tools, datasets, and solutions addressing energy efficiency in video streaming presented at ACM Multimedia Systems 2024 and its co-located workshop ACM Green Multimedia Systems. Introduction Across various platforms, users seek ...
Towards Immersive Digiphysical Experiences
Immersive experiences have the potential of redefining traditional forms of media engagement by intricately combining reality with imagination. Motivated by necessities, current developments and emerging technologies, this column sets out to bridge immersive experiences in both digital and physical realities. Fitting under the umbrella term of eXtended Reality (XR), the first section describes various realizations ...
Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Quality of Experience Modelling
Data-driven Quality of Experience (QoE) modelling using Machine Learning (ML) arose as a promising alternative to the cumbersome and potentially biased manual QoE modelling. However, the reasoning of a majority of ML models is not explainable due to their black-box characteristics, which prevents us from gaining insights about how the model actually related QoE influence ...
Sustainability vs. Quality of Experience: Striking the Right Balance for Video Streaming
The exponential growth in internet data traffic, driven by the widespread use of video streaming applications, has resulted in increased energy consumption and carbon emissions. This outcome is primarily due to higher resolution or higher framerates content and the ability to watch videos on various end-devices. However, efforts to reduce energy consumption in video streaming ...
Green Video Streaming: Challenges and Opportunities
Introduction Regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2021 and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 “climate action”, urgent action is needed against climate change and global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the next few years . This urgency also applies to the energy consumption of digital technologies. Internet data traffic is responsible for ...
Towards the design and evaluation of more sustainable multimedia experiences: which role can QoE research play?
In this column, we reflect on the environmental impact and broader sustainability implications of resource-demanding digital applications and services such as video streaming, VR/AR/XR and videoconferencing. We put emphasis not only on the experiences and use cases they enable but also on the “cost” of always striving for high Quality of Experience (QoE) and better ...
What is the trade-off between CO2 emission and video-conferencing QoE?
It is a natural thing that users of multimedia services want to have the highest possible Quality of Experience (QoE), when using said services. This is especially so in contexts such as video-conferencing and video streaming services, which are nowadays a large part of many users’ daily life, be it work-related Zoom calls, or relaxing ...
Towards an updated understanding of immersive multimedia experiences
Bringing theories and measurement techniques up to date Development of technology for immersive multimedia experiences Immersive multimedia experiences, as its name is suggesting are those experiences focusing on media that is able to immerse users with different interactions into an experience of an environment. Through different technologies and approaches, immersive media is emulating a physical world through ...
MPEG Visual Quality Assessment Advisory Group: Overview and Perspectives
Introduction The perceived visual quality is of utmost importance in the context of visual media compression, such as 2D, 3D, immersive video, and point clouds. The trade-off between compression efficiency and computational/implementation complexity has a crucial impact on the success of a compression scheme. This specifically holds for the development of visual media compression standards which ...
ITU-T Standardization Activities Targeting Gaming Quality of Experience
Motivation for Research in the Gaming Domain The gaming industry has eminently managed to intrinsically motivate users to interact with their services. According to the latest report of Newzoo, there will be an estimated total of 2.7 billion players across the globe by the end of 2020. The global games market will generate revenues of $159.3 billion in 2020 . This ...
Immersive Media Experiences – Why finding Consensus is Important
An introduction to the QUALINET White Paper on Definitions of Immersive Media Experience (IMEx) . Introduction Immersive media are reshaping the way users experience reality. They are increasingly incorporated across enterprise and consumer sectors to offer experiential solutions to a diverse range of industries. Current technologies that afford an immersive media experience (IMEx) include Augmented Reality (AR), ...
Towards Interactive QoE Assessment of Robotic Telepresence
Telepresence robots (TPRs) are remote-controlled, wheeled devices with an internet connection. A TPR can “teleport” you to a remote location, let you drive around and interact with people. A TPR user can feel present in the remote location by being able to control the robot position, movements, actions, voice and video. A TPR facilitates human-to-human ...
Definitions of Crowdsourced Network and QoE Measurements
1 Introduction and Definitions Crowdsourcing is a well-established concept in the scientific community, used for instance by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in 2005 to describe how businesses were using the Internet to outsource work to the crowd , but can be dated back up to 1849 (weather prediction in the US). Crowdsourcing has enabled a ...
Collaborative QoE Management using SDN
The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm offers the flexibility and programmability in the deployment and management of network services by separating the Control plane from the Data plane. Being based on network abstractions and virtualization techniques, SDN allows for simplifying the implementation of traffic engineering techniques as well as the communication among different services providers, included Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Over ...
Can the Multimedia Research Community via Quality of Experience contribute to a better Quality of Life?
Can the multimedia community contribute to a better Quality of Life? Delivering a higher resolution and distortion-free media stream so you can enjoy the latest movie on Netflix or YouTube may provide instantaneous satisfaction, but does it make your long term life better? Whilst the QoMEX conference series has traditionally considered the former, in more ...
Report on QoMEX 2019: QoE and User Experience in Times of Machine Learning, 5G and Immersive Technologies
The QoMEX 2019 was held from 5 to 7 June 2019 in Berlin, with Sebastian Möller (TU Berlin and DFKI) and Sebastian Egger-Lampl (AIT Vienna) as general chairs. The annual conference celebrated its 10th birthday in Berlin since the first edition in 2009 in San Diego. The latter focused on classic multimedia voice, video and ...
Qualinet Databases: Central Resource for QoE Research – History, Current Status, and Plans
Introduction Datasets are an enabling tool for successful technological development and innovation in numerous fields. Large-scale databases of multimedia content play a crucial role in the development and performance evaluation of multimedia technologies. Among those are most importantly audiovisual signal processing, for example coding, transmission, subjective/objective quality assessment, and QoE (Quality of Experience) . Publicly available ...
Report from QoE-Management 2019
The 3rd International Workshop on Quality of Experience Management (QoE-Management 2019) was a successful full day event held on February 18, 2019 in Paris, France, where it was co-located with the 22nd Conference on Innovation in Clouds, Internet and Networks (ICIN). After the success of the previous QoE-Management workshops, the third edition of the workshop ...
On System QoE: Merging the system and the QoE perspectives
With Quality of Experience (QoE) research having made significant advances over the years, increased attention is being put on exploiting this knowledge from a service/network provider perspective in the context of the user-centric evaluation of systems. Current research investigates the impact of system/service mechanisms, their implementation or configurations on the service performance and how it ...
Solving Complex Issues through Immersive Narratives — Does QoE Play a Role?
Introduction A transdisciplinary dialogue and innovative research, including technical and artistic research as well as digital humanities are necessary to solve complex issues. We need to support and produce creative practices, and engage in a critical reflection about the social and ethical dimensions of our current technology developments. At the core is an understanding that no ...
