High-resolution video is defining a new age of peer-assisted video streaming over the public Internet. Streaming over 1-Mbps videos in a scalable and global manner presents a challenging milestone. In this work, we examine the feasibility of 1-Mbps streaming through a global measurement study. In contrast to previous measurement studies that crawl commercial applications, we conduct fine-grain, controlled experiments on a configurable platform. We developed and deployed FastMesh-SIM, a novel peer-assisted streaming system that leverages proxies, scalable streaming trees and IP multicast to achieve 1-Mbps streaming at a global scale. With the configurability-enabled design, we are allowed to conduct controlled experiments by varying design decisions under a wide range of operating conditions, and measuring in-depth, finegrain metrics at a per-hop, per-segment level. We collected hundreds of hours of streaming traces that broadcast live TV channels to more than 120 peers and 30 proxies, with a global geographic footprint over 8 different countries. Data analysis demonstrates how a set of design decisions collectively overcome the 1-Mbps barrier. The various operational issues we uncovered provide insights to service providers that want to deploy a commercial system at a larger scale and a higher streaming rate. By comparing theory and practice, we also confirm theory-inspired architectural decisions, and show that our system indeed achieves throughputs close to theoretical upper-bound calculated under many ideal assumptions.

GeoTV is a project that explores seamless integration of mobile phones, HDTV sets, and computers in the living room to enrich the user experience of existing services. The three- screen service allows a user to navigate a world map on a smart phone to track geo-located media RSS content that matches her personal interests. The user can show a matching video clip on her phone or direct a nearby HDTV set to play the video. In addition, the user can bring up a world map on a nearby computer screen to navigate areas of interest related to the video clip. GeoTV allows all three screens to be used for what they are best for: HDTV for high resolution video, computer screen for browsing a world map, and a smart phone for personalized control at hand to select media of interest.

Recent advances in P2P technology have made it a viable alternative for the delivery of rich media by both content and service providers. However, to better understand and utilize P2P technologies in building a scalable media distribution platform, the nature of the underlying network must be taken into consideration. Although many P2P simulations have been conducted previously, very few were evaluated on a real P2P testbed with the properties of the physical network in mind. In this paper, we describe VP2P, a virtual machine-based P2P testbed, which supports P2P studies with the consideration of typical service provider networks. We use four fully equipped MacPro's to emulate 32 peers in the current implementation. Experiments of three P2P algorithms for video on demand (VoD) services: BitTorrent, Toast, and Zebra, were run on the testbed. We discuss the rationales behind the hardware and software architecture of VP2P, report our results, and conclude with lessons learned and future directions for VM-based testbeds.

IPTV, enabled by aggregating new technologies in computing, networking, and storage, provides a new information access and entertainment platform in the world of digital evolution. From this perspective where information and entertainment are part of each other, we write this paper to address the issues of IPTV towards seamless infotainment. We focus our discussions to explore such IPTV potentials from three aspects: information access and distribution, improving quality of entertainment, and enabling seamless infotainment. In addition, relevant topics such as IPTV standards and future directions are also discussed.

P2P file transfers and streaming have already seen a tremendous growth in Internet applications. With the rapid growth of IPTV, the need to efficiently disseminate large volumes of Video-on-Demand (VoD) content has prompted IPTV service providers to consider peer-assisted VoD content delivery. This paper describes Zebroid, a VoD solution that uses IPTV operational data on an on-going basis to determine how to pre-position popular contents in customer set-top boxes during idle hours to allow these peers to assist the VoD server in content delivery during peak hours. Latest VoD request distribution, set-top box availability, and capacity data on network components are all taken into consideration in determining the parameters used in the striping algorithm of Zebroid. We show both by simulation and emulation on a realistic IPTV testbed that the VoD server load can be significantly reduced by more than 50-80% during peak hours by using Zebroid.

2008 will be the "Mobile Eureka! Moment". With the Olympics just round the corner and the mobile market experiencing a phenomenal growth, we believe that WWW 2008 will truly be the climax and focal point in the midst of this mobile revolution. Mobile Web Initiative spearheaded by W3C is making a strong stand on how to realize the vision of pervasive mobile computing. Three screen services (TV, PC, Phone) are demanding new architectures to be developed. Furthermore, the need to go beyond technology, demands an embrace of the human-centric aspects of mobile computing. The objective of this workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers, sociologists, and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions, and set future directions in personalized applications for mobile users with a focus in rich social media.

This paper investigates a novel concept of providing seamless control and portability of an IPTV viewing session. A solution employing a middleware system, a secure hardware token and a cell phone are used to demonstrate how an IPTV session can be securely controlled remotely and moved between multiple viewing stations. We have built a prototype of the system and demonstrated its flexible features. Depending on the user's protocol of choice, most remote control operations from a mobile device took less than 5 seconds to execute. An interesting capability of previewing content of other channels via the user's device while still continuing to watch the program on the viewing station differentiates it from today's IPTV offers. Finally for mobile content delivery, we address the problem of dynamic device profile selection and content adaptation using a classification algorithm to match the best content alternative destined for a mobile.

The Web is rapidly moving towards a platform for mass collaboration in content production and consumption from three screens: computers, mobile phones, and TVs. While there has been a surge of interests in making Web content accessible from mobile devices, there is a significant lack of progress when it comes to making the web experience suitable for viewing on a television. Towards this end, we describe a novel concept, namely GeoTV, where we explore a framework by which web content can be presented or pushed in a meaningful manner to create an entertainment experience for the TV audience. Fresh content on a variety of topics, people, and places is being created and made available on the Web at breathtaking speed. Navigating fresh content effectively on TV demands a new browsing paradigm that requires fewer mouse clicks or user interactions from the remote control. Novel geospatial and temporal browsing techniques are provided in GeoTV that allow users the capability of aggregating and navigating RSS-enabled content in a timely, personalized and automatic manner for viewing in an IPTV environment. This poster is an extension of our previous work on GeoTracker that utilizes both a geospatial representation and a temporal (chronological) presentation to help users spot the most relevant updates quickly within the context of a Web-enabled environment. We demonstrate 1) the usability of such a tool that greatly enhances a user.s ability in locating and browsing videos based on his or her geographical interests and 2) various innovative interface designs for showing RSS-enabled information in an IPTV environment.

The Web is rapidly moving towards a platform for mass collaboration in content production and consumption. Fresh content on a variety of topics, people, and places is being created and made available on the Web at breathtaking speed. Navigating the content effectively not only requires techniques such as aggregating various RSS-enabled feeds, but it also demands a new browsing paradigm. In this paper, we present novel geospatial and temporal browsing techniques that provide users with the capability of aggregating and navigating RSS-enabled content in a timely, personalized and automatic manner. In particular, we describe a system called GeoTracker that utilizes both a geospatial representation and a temporal (chronological) presentation to help users spot the most relevant updates quickly. Within the context of this work, we provide a middleware engine that supports intelligent aggregation and dissemination of RSS feeds with personalization to desktops and mobile devices. We study the navigation capabilities of this system on two kinds of data sets, namely, 2006 World Cup soccer data collected over two months and breaking news items that occur every day. We also demonstrate that the application of such technologies to the video search results returned by YouTube and Google greatly enhances a user.s ability in locating and browsing videos based on his or her geographical interests. Finally, we demonstrate that the location inference performance of GeoTracker compares well against machine learning techniques used in the natural language processing/information retrieval community. Despite its algorithm simplicity, it preserves high recall percentages.

This paper studies the conditions under which P2P sharing can increase the capacity of IPTV services over FTTN networks. For a typical FTTN network, our study shows a) P2P sharing is not beneficial when the total traffic in a local video office is low; b) P2P sharing increases the load on FTTN switches and routers in local video offices; c) P2P sharing is the most beneficial when the network bottleneck is experienced in the southbound segment of a local video office (equivalently a northbound segment of an FTTN switch); and d) sharing among all FTTN serving communities is not needed when network congestion problems are solved by using some other technologies such as program pre-caching or replication. Based on the analytical results, design for IPTV services which monitors FTTN network conditions and decides when and how to share videos among peers to maximize the service capacity. Simulations and bounds both validate the potential benefits of the MediaGrid IPTV service platform.

Customized multimedia content delivery has become one of the most desirable applications to mobile device users. However its intense usage of wireless and user interfaces poses a great challenge to device usability and battery lifetime. In this paper, we describe our design and implementation of an energy-efficient multimedia messaging system to address this challenge. We construct a hierarchical system for users to access multimedia content, leveraging widely available short message service (SMS), an embedded system-based new interfacing device, and the Internet capability of mobile devices. Being the first of its type, the new system not only reduces energy overhead but also improves the usability of the service.

Media consumers who are overwhelmed by multitudinous news content demand a system that would sift through tens or hundreds of broadcast TV channels on a daily basis to capture the most important clips that match users' interests and deliver these personalized clips for easy viewing on a typical TV or home PC. In this paper, we present a personal media alert system that extracts video segments for the interested users. In addition, alerts with pointers to content stored on the home server can be sent to mobile users who are authorized to access the content at home. To make content sharing feasible and scalable, we also propose a P2P payment scheme that would allow a consumer to have access to media clips aggregated on other consumers' personal media systems

We present a system for automatic monitoring and timely dissemination of multimedia information to a range or mobile information appliances based on each user's interest profile. Multimedia processing algorithms detect and isolate relevant video segments from over twenty television broadcast programs based on a collection or words and phrases specified by the user. Content repurposing techniques are then used to convert the information into a form that is suitable for delivery to the user's mobile devices. Alerts are sent using a number of application messaging and network access protocols including email, short message service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), voice, session initiation protocol (SIP), fax, and pager protocols. The system is evaluated with respect to performance and user experiences. The MediaAlert system provides an effective and low-cost solution for the timely generation of alerts containing personal, business, and security information.

This paper shows that the performance bottleneck in software MPEG-2 video decoders has shifted to memory operations, as microprocessor technologies have been improving at a fast rate during the past few years. We exploit concurrencies between the processor and the memory sub-system at macroblock level to alleviate the performance bottleneck. First, the paper introduces an interleaved-block order data layout to improve cache performance. Second, the paper describes an algorithm to explicitly prefetch macroblocks for motion compensation. Finally, the paper presents an algorithm to schedule interleaved decoding and output at macroblock level. Our implementation and experiments show that these methods successfully hide the latency of memory and frame buffer. These techniques improve the performance of an already optimized software MPEG-2 decoder by about a factor of two. On a 933 MHz Pentium III PC, the decoder can play 720p HDTV streams at over 62 frames per second.

In this paper we address the research issues in providing personalized multimedia services, which enable a mobile user to remotely record video programs, control cameras, and request the delivery of pre-recorded or live video content to his or her own mobile device. We describe a mobile service platform that authenticates users who send service requests from various mobile devices, transcodes video content based on user and device profiles, and authorizes the delivery of content from a media server to the proper client device. The media server adapts automatically to the fluctuations of the wireless channel conditions for reasonable viewing on the client device. The mobile service platform essentially manages the control path, while the media server handles the actual content delivery. We discuss various aspects of the integration and report our successful experiments conducted on wireless LAN and CDPD networks.

D.T. Harper (see ibid., vol.43, no.10, p.618-22, 1994) introduced a storage scheme in a multiaccess frame buffer scenario and showed that the proposed architecture allows parallel access to constant area rectangles of the array of pixels stored in the frame buffer. These comments show that the claim may not be true. There are cases when parallel access is not possible.

Multicomputers can be effectively used for interactive graphics rendering only if there are mechanisms available to rapidly composite and transfer images to an external display device. One method for achieving the necessary bandwidth for this operation is to provide multiple high-bandwidth ports into a frame buffer. In this paper, we evaluate the design space of a multiport frame buffer design for the Intel Paragon mesh routing network. We use an instrumented rendering system to capture the graphics operations needed for rendering a number of three-dimensional scenes; we then use those workloads as input to test programs running on the Paragon to estimate the performance of our hardware. Our experiments consider three major design questions: how many network ports the frame buffer needs, whether Z-Buffering should be done in hardware on the frame buffer or in software on the computing nodes, and whether the design alternatives are scalable.