Alors que les services de streaming vidéo (Netflix +YouTube) représentent plus de 50% du trafic web des foyers américains sur leurs lignes fixes, l'expansion de la mobilité (4G LTE et LTEa) et l'arrivée des réseaux du futur (NGN) avec la distinction entre opérateur de réseaux et opérateurs de services, risquent de modifier le modèle économique des fournisseurs de service. Le modèle en Best-effort utilisé actuellement par les services de streaming risque de péricliter dû au coût important lié à ce type de fonctionnement. Il convient donc de réfléchir à un modèle optimisant les flux du service à envoyer en fonction du besoin réel des utilisateurs finaux. L'objectif principal de cette thèse est donc de proposer une solution permettant de prendre en compte la QoE au sein des services de streaming. Dans une première partie de cette thèse, nous mettons en avant le caractère très personnel de la qualité d'expérience lors d'une session de visionnage multimédia. Ceci est réalisé par des tests subjectifs sur une cinquantaine d'utilisateurs. Nous présentons ensuite une architecture permettant la prise en compte de la QoE au sein des protocoles de streaming HTTP adaptatifs (HTTP Live Streaming, DASH ...) afin de prendre des décisions d'adaptation du service non plus sur la bande passante disponible à un instant T, mais sur les attentes implicites de l'utilisateur et ceci d'une manière non intrusive. L‘implémentation d'une preuve du concept est illustrée à travers la création d'un projet open source (http://ipfhas.github.io/) / While streaming video services (Netflix + YouTube} represent more than 50% of US households consumed bandwidth, the growth of mobility (4G LTE + LTEa) and the arrival of 3 next generation networks (NGN) with the distinction between network operator and service operator may change the business model of service providers. The Best-Effort model currently used by streaming services will decrease due to its hight cost. It is therefore necessary to consider a model optimizing the service flow based on real users expectations. The main objective of this thesis is to propose a solution which take into account the QoE in streaming services. In the first art of this thesis, we highlight the very personal nature of the quality of experience during viewing multimedia session. This is achieved by subjective tests on fifty users. Then, we present an architecture for the QoE consideration in HTTP adaptive streaming protocols (HTTP Live Streaming, DASH ...) to make adaptation decisions based on implicit expectations of the user. A proof of concept is illustrated through an open source project (http://ipfhas.github.io/)

The technological development contributes to an increase in advertising when it comes to media. Those who are working to develop advertising are constantly looking for new ways to reach consumers in unexplored contexts. Web TV is a relatively new technique that involves the distribution of television across the Internet. This study intend to investigate how users perceive advertising appearing on web TV, and contribute to the knowledge about how advertising adapt to new media. To reach the results of this study, we used quantitative data, collected in the form of web-surveys and qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews. The results of the study showed that the user has a negative attitude towards advertisements on web TV. Despite the negativity, the user still understand and recognize the importance of advertising concerning the survival of tv-channels online. It is also clear that the choice of web TV service mainly is based on the supply of programs, and not on how the service contain advertising or not. / Den teknologiska utvecklingen bidrar till att reklam i media ökar. Reklamutvecklare söker ständigt nya sätt att nå konsumenten genom reklam i outforskade sammanhang. Webb-TV är en relativt ny teknik som innebär distribution av television via internet. Denna studie avser att undersöka hur användare upplever reklaminslag som förekommer på webb-TV samt bidra med kunskap om hur reklam anpassas till nya medier. För att komma fram till studiens resultat användes kvantitativ datainsamling i form av webb-enkäter samt kvalitativ datainsamling genom semistrukturerade intervjuer. Resultatet av studien visade att användaren har en mycket negativ inställning till reklaminslag på webb-TV. Trots den negativa inställningen har användaren ändå förståelse och inser vikten av reklam för webb-TV-kanalernas överlevnad. Det framgår även att valet av webb-TV-tjänst främst grundar sig på programutbudet och inte på om tjänsten konsumerar reklam eller inte.

With the increasing demand of video applications in wireless networks, how to better support video transmission over wireless networks has drawn much attention to the research community. Time-varying and error-prone nature of wireless channel makes video transmission in wireless networks a challenging task to provide the users with satisfactory watching experience. For different video applications, we choose different video coding techniques accordingly. E.g., for Internet video streaming, we choose standardized H.264 video codec; for video transmission in sensor networks or multicast, we choose simple and energy-conserving video coding technique based on compressive sensing. Thus, the challenges for different video transmission applications are different. Therefore, This dissertation tackles video transmission problem in three different applications. First, for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH), we investigate the streaming strategy. Specifically, we focus on the rate adaptation algorithm for streaming scalable video (H.264/SVC) in wireless networks. We model the rate adaptation problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), aiming to find an optimal streaming strategy in terms of user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) such as playback interruption, average playback quality and playback smoothness. We then obtain the optimal MDP solution using dynamic programming. However, the optimal solution requires the knowledge of the available bandwidth statistics and has a large number of states, which makes it difficult to obtain the optimal solution in real time. Therefore, we further propose an online algorithm which integrates the learning and planning process. The proposed online algorithm collects bandwidth statistics and makes streaming decisions in real time. A reward parameter has been defined in our proposed streaming strategy, which can be adjusted to make a good trade-off between the average playback quality and playback smoothness.We also use a simple testbed to validate our proposed algorithm. Second, for video transmission in wireless sensor networks, we consider a wireless sensor node monitoring the environment and it is equipped with a compressive-sensing based, single-pixel image camera and other sensors such as temperature and humidity sensors. The wireless node needs to send the data out in a timely and energy efficient way. This transmission control problem is challenging in that we need to jointly consider perceived video quality, quality variation, power consumption and transmission delay requirements, and the wireless channel uncertainty. We address the above issues by first building a rate-distortion model for compressive sensing video. Then we formulate the deterministic and stochastic optimization problems and design the transmission control algorithm which jointly performs rate control, scheduling and power control. Third, we propose a low-complex, scalable video coding architecture based on compressive sensing (SVCCS) for wireless unicast and multicast transmissions. SVCCS achieves good scalability, error resilience and coding efficiency. SVCCS encoded bitstream is divided into base and enhancement layers. The layered structure provides quality and temporal scalability. While in the enhancement layer, the CS measurements provide fine granular quality scalability. We also investigate the rate allocation problem for multicasting SVCCS encoded bitstream to a group of receivers with heterogeneous channel conditions. Specifically, we study how to allocate rate between the base and enhancement layer to improve the overall perceived video quality for all the receivers. / Graduate / 0984 / siyxiang@ece.uvic.ca

The fish ear contains three dense, bony bodies (otoliths) surrounded by fluid (the endolymph) and tissue. Under acoustic stimulation, the surrounding fluid and tissues oscillate relative to the otoliths, stimulating the endolymph as well as the array of hair cell cilia adjacent to the otolith and embedded in tissue. It is believed that the hair cell cilia move with the surrounding fluid. This doctoral thesis studied the steady streaming (i.e., time-independent) component of the acoustically induced fluid motion inside of the fish ear to determine how the hair cell cilia displacements due to the steady streaming could provide acoustically relevant information to the fish. This research characterizes the fluid flow around oscillating model otoliths, namely spheroids, grooved spheroids, and a 350% scale model of a cod saccular otolith. This study models the otolithic endorgan as an oscillating body in a Newtonian fluid. The model ignores the surrounding tissues and assumes that the hair cell cilia move like the surrounding fluid. Particle pathline visualizations and particle-image velocimetry (PIV) are used to characterize the flow fields at various oscillation orientations, frequencies and amplitudes. These data are used to determine the location of the stagnation points on the body surface and at the boundaries of the inner rotating region of the flow. Studies are also conducted on bodies sinusoidally oscillated at both a single frequency and two (simultaneous) frequencies along the same direction. Both the steady streaming flow patterns and velocity fields are found to contain acoustically relevant information, but given the very small displacements associated with these flows, it is unclear if the steady streaming flows can be sensed by the fish ear.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universiteit Leiden, 2003. / "Proefschrift." "Complex Streamed Instruction Set (CSI)"--Pref. Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-146).

In recent years, adaptive HTTP streaming protocols have become the de facto standard in the industry for the distribution of live and video-on-demand content over the Internet. In this thesis, we solve the problem of distributing adaptive HTTP live video streams to a large number of viewers using peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays. We do so by assuming that our solution must deliver a level of quality of user experience which is the same as a CDN while trying to minimize the load on the content provider’s infrastructure. Besides that, in the design of our solution, we take into consideration the realities of the HTTP streaming protocols, such as the pull-based approach and adaptive bitrate switching. The result of this work is a system which we call SmoothCache that provides CDN-quality adaptive HTTP live streaming utilizing P2P algorithms. Our experiments on a real network of thousands of consumer machines show that, besides meeting the the CDN-quality constraints, SmoothCache is able to consistently deliver up to 96% savings towards the source of the stream in a single bitrate scenario and 94% in a multi-bitrate scenario. In addition, we have conducted a number of pilot deployments in the setting of large enterprises with the same system, albeit tailored to private networks. Results with thousands of real viewers show that our platform provides an average offloading of bottlenecks in the private network of 91.5%. These achievements were made possible by advancements in multiple research areas that are also presented in this thesis. Each one of the contributions is novel with respect to the state of the art and can be applied outside of the context of our application. However, in our system they serve the purposes described below. We built a component-based event-driven framework to facilitate the development of our live streaming application. The framework allows for running the same code both in simulation and in real deployment. In order to obtain scalability of simulations and accuracy, we designed a novel flow-based bandwidth emulation model. In order to deploy our application on real networks, we have developed a network library which has the novel feature of providing on-the-fly prioritization of transfers. The library is layered over the UDP protocol and supports NAT Traversal techniques. As part of this thesis, we have also improved on the state of the art of NAT Traversal techniques resulting in higher probability of direct connectivity between peers on the Internet. Because of the presence of NATs on the Internet, discovery of new peers and collection of statistics on the overlay through peer sampling is problematic. Therefore, we created a peer sampling service which is NAT-aware and provides one order of magnitude fresher samples than existing peer sampling protocols. Finally, we designed SmoothCache as a peer-assisted live streaming system based on a distributed caching abstraction. In SmoothCache, peers retrieve video fragments from the P2P overlay as quickly as possible or fall back to the source of the stream to keep the timeliness of the delivery. In order to produce savings, the caching system strives to fill up the local cache of the peers ahead of playback by prefetching content. Fragments are efficiently distributed by a self-organizing overlay network that takes into account many factors such as upload bandwidth capacity, connectivity constraints, performance history and the currently being watched bitrate. / <p>QC 20131122</p>

xxii, 413 p. : ill. / Streaming multimedia content over the Internet is extremely popular mainly due to emerging applications such as IPTV, YouTube and e-learning. All these applications require simultaneous streaming of multimedia content from one or multiple sources to a large number of users. Such applications impose unique requirements in terms of server bandwidth and playback delay which are difficult to achieve in a scalable fashion with the traditional client-server architecture. Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays offer a promising approach to support scalable streaming applications, that we broadly refer to as "P2P streaming". Design of a scalable P2P streaming mechanism that accommodates heterogeneity of peers' bandwidth and copes with dynamics of peer participation while ensuring in-time delivery of the multimedia content to individual peers is extremely challenging. Besides these fundamental challenges, P2P streaming applications are facing practical issues such as encouraging peers' contribution and decreasing the costly inter-ISP P2P traffic. In this dissertation, we study several aspects of live P2P streaming with the goal of improving the performance of such systems. This dissertation can be categorized into two parts as follows. ( i ) We present the design and evaluation of a mesh-based live P2P streaming mechanism, called PRIME. Further, we perform a head-to-head comparison between the two approaches on live P2P streaming, namely tree-based and mesh-based. We demonstrate the superiority of the mesh-based approach. In the quest for a systematic comparison of existing mesh-based solutions on live P2P streaming, we leverage the insights from our design in PRIME and propose an evaluation methodology. Utilizing the evaluation methodology, we compare the performance of existing mesh-based live P2P streaming solutions. ( ii ) From a more practical perspective, we tackle some of the existing practical issues in the deployment of live P2P streaming applications, namely providing incentives for participating peers to contribute their resources and designing ISP-friendly live P2P streaming protocols with the ultimate goal of reducing costly inter-ISP traffic. In the end, this dissertation reveals fundamental trade-offs in the design, comparison and meaningful evaluation of basic and practical live P2P streaming mechanisms under realistic settings. This dissertation includes my previously published and my co-authored materials. / Committee in charge: Prof. Reza Rejaie, Chair; Prof. Virginia Lo; Prof. Jun Li; Prof. David Levin; Prof. Markus Hofmann

Les effets non linéaires de l’acoustique et en particulier le streaming de Rayleigh sont étudiés depuis les années 1850 où Lord Rayleigh fit l’observation d’un écoulement quasi permanent se superposant à l’onde acoustique qui se propageait dans un résonateur. Ce phénomène n’est donc pas nouveau et il a par ailleurs été le sujet de nombreuses études. Il a néanmoins été adopté comme point de départ de cette thèse, à ceci près que nous avons choisi de l’appliquer ici au cas particulier de la thermoacoustique. Cette nouvelle discipline qui a commencé à se développer dans les années 1980 met en œuvre un processus (basé sur la conversion réciproque entre énergie acoustique et énergie thermique) utilisé dans les systèmes thermoacoustiques tels que les moteurs ou réfrigérateurs. C’est une nouvelle technologie propre et fiable qui a de nombreux avantages. Cependant lorsque ces machines fonctionnent à forts niveaux acoustiques des effets indésirables viennent perturber le fonctionnement et réduire le rendement. Au cours de cette thèse nous nous sommes efforcés à analyser et évaluer expérimentalement ces effets indésirables et non linéaires qui se caractérisent entre autres par l’apparition du streaming de Rayleigh. Un objectif pas si élémentaire car ces phénomènes du second ordre amènent généralement à des situations délicates où les interactions et couplages entre les différents effets rencontrés sont très présents. L’interaction d’un gradient de température au sein du résonateur, de la géométrie de ce dernier ou encore l’interaction d’un stack thermoacoustique sur le streaming de Rayleigh sont autant de points sur lesquels nous nous sommes concentrés. Pour mener à terme cette étude, un premier résonateur acoustique muni d’une cellule de mesure a été utilisé pour valider la méthode expérimentale retenue. La PIV (Velocimétrie par Image de Particules) a été retenue comme technique la plus appropriée à la mesure des non linéarités de l’écoulement et du streaming de Rayleigh. Un second résonateur a ensuite été réalisé puis mis en place au laboratoire afin d’effectuer des mesures de plus grande envergure. Les résultats confirment les conclusions tirées de précédentes études et montrent la présence de quatre cellules contrarotatives au sein du résonateur. Par ailleurs la totalité du résonateur a pu être cartographiée permettant ainsi de visualiser l’ensemble des écoulements secondaires présents. L’intrication du streaming avec la température se révèle complexe. L’introduction de nouveaux éléments dans le résonateur (tels que les échangeurs) vient en effet créer des phénomènes qui se superposent aux effets déjà présents. Afin de continuer le travail débuté au cours de cette thèse, de nouveaux essais sont prévus. Ils permettront d’analyser plus finement les diverses interactions entre phénomènes. / Nonlinear acoustic effects and Rayleigh streaming in particular are studied since the 1850s when Lord Rayleigh made the observation of a quasi-steady flow superimposed on the acoustic wave propagating in a resonator. This phenomenon may not be new and it has moreover been the subject of numerous studies. However, it was adopted as the starting point of this thesis, except that we have chosen to apply it to the particular case of thermoacoustics. This new discipline that has started raising interest in the 1980s features a process –based on reverse conversion between thermal and acoustic energy- used in systems such as thermoacoustic engines and refrigerators. This is a new, clean and reliable technology that has many advantages. However, when these machines operate at high acoustic levels unwanted and nonlinear effects appear reducing the machine performances. In this thesis we therefore have tried to analyze and experimentally evaluate these effects which among other things are characterized by the appearance of Rayleigh streaming. This goal is not so elementary as these second-order phenomena generally lead to tricky situations where interactions and couplings between the different effects encountered are very present. The interaction of a temperature gradient within the resonator, the geometry of the latter or the interaction of a thermoacoustic stack on Rayleigh streaming are many points on which we focused. To complete this study, an acoustic resonator with a measurement cell was first used to validate the experimental method chosen. PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) has proven to be an appropriate technique for the measurement of acoustical nonlinearities and Rayleigh streaming. A second resonator was then achieved and implemented in the laboratory to make measurements on a larger scale. The results confirm the findings of previous studies and show the presence of two counter-rotating cells within the resonator. Moreover the entire resonator has been mapped allowing visualizing all secondary flows. The interaction of streaming with temperature is complex. The introduction of new elements in the resonator such as heat exchangers has indeed created additional phenomena that superimposed on already existing effects. To continue the work started in this thesis, further tests are planned. They will further analyze the interactions between theses various phenomena.

Over the past 10 years online video streaming has seen a tremendous increase in popularity, as it has become a great source of both entertainment and education. This increase in popularity has led to demands for higher quality streams, shorter buffering time and service adaptivity, based on the user’s personal prerequisites. These demands together with a constant increase in Internet usage have posed several challenges for streaming service providers to overcome. Within this master thesis an exploratory research and development project has been conducted. The project’s purpose has been to investigate common approaches, standards and trends related to establishing a multimedia streaming service. Based on the results from these investigations, the purpose has furthermore been to design and implement a proof-of-concept streaming server fulfilling the thesis internship company’s needs and requirements. Research has concluded that there are at least five vital components, which have to be carefully considered in order to establish a successful streaming service. These vital components are; the service system structure, the service application programming interface (API), the service hosting solution, the service data storage solution and finally the actual streaming module. Based on results from conducted investigations of common design approaches for each vital component, decisions for the thesis project implementation have been made. The resulting system has been built using the event-based system structure framework Node.js. A representational state transfer (REST) API has furthermore been implemented for managing client request routing. The resulting system has been implemented on a self-hosted server solution even though this is neither a preferred choice in theory nor common practice. The decision has however been made due to future plans at the thesis internship company of investing in a corporate-wide cloud-based server solution. For the service data storage solution the relation-based database management system MySQL has been implemented. For the final recognized vital component, the streaming module, support for HTTP-based multimedia streams has been implemented. This choice of technique has been made due to the many benefits brought on by using HTTP, such as cost efficiency and bandwidth optimization. The use of HTTP is also currently a trending choice of technique Thesis for Master’s Degree at HIT and LiU within the streaming community due to the recently published standard MPEG-DASH.

Forskningsfråga och syften Studiens forskningsfråga är följande:   Hur har reklam på sociala medier och på streamingsajter förändrat den traditionella TV-reklamens betydelse ur ett kundperspektiv?   Utifrån forskningsfrågan har studiens tre delsyften utformats, vilka är att: undersöka TV-reklamens relevans idag, analysera och klargöra fördelar och nackdelar med TV-reklam jämfört med reklam på sociala medier och streamingsajter, redogöra för hur streamings utveckling påverkat konsumenternas TV-tittande. Metod Studien har en kvalitativ forskningsmetod som grund. Den vetenskapliga ansatsen är ett växelspel mellan deduktion och induktion. Empirin i studien utgörs av diskussioner som skett i fem fokusgrupper med fem individer i respektive grupp. Vidare har fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer med företag genomförts.   Slutsatser Studien påvisar att TV-reklam är av relevans än idag, trots att TV-tittandet har minskat. Reklamen undviks dock aktivt av tittarna. Däremot framhäver studien att reklamen fortfarande har effekt på konsumenten då den lägger sig på deras minne. Det verkar även som att vissa reklamtyper är mer effektiva än andra, som exempelvis emotionella eller humoristiska reklamfilmer. Vidare framgår det att fördelarna och nackdelarna för reklam på TV, sociala medier och streamingsajter inte enbart är plattformsspecifika. Dessa styrs istället i stort av konsumenternas uppfattning om reklam i allmänhet. Konsumenternas känsla av frihet att välja sitt eget innehåll har bidragit till ökad popularitet hos streamingsajter. Det tydliggörs utifrån studien att TV-tittandet har förändrats då allt fler individer engagerar sig i multiskärmbeteende. Slutligen lyfts det i studien fram att det inte enbart är sociala medier och streamingsajter som påverkat TV-reklamen. Det framgår även att konsumenternas inställning till TV-reklam i sin tur har påverkat deras inställning till reklam på sociala medier och streamingsajter. / Research Question and Purpose The research question of this study is:   How has advertising on social media and streaming sites changed the meaning of traditional TV-advertisements from a consumer perspective?   Based on the research question above, the three purposes of this study are to:   examine the relevance of TV-advertising today, analyze and clarify the advantages and disadvantages of TV-commercials in comparison to commercials on social media and on streaming sites, account for the impact that the development of streaming has had on consumer television viewing.   Method The study has a qualitative research method as a basis. The scientific approach is an interplay of deduction and induction. The empiric data in the study consists of discussions that took place in five focus groups with five individuals in each group. In addition, four semi-structured interviews with companies have been conducted.   Conclusions The study shows that TV-advertising is still of relevance today, even though TV-viewing has decreased. However, it appears as though the commercials are being actively avoided by the viewers. On the other hand, the study emphasizes that commercials still have an impact on the consumer since the advertisements imprint on their memory. It also seems as if some types of advertising are more effective than others, such as emotional or humorous commercials. Furthermore, it appears that the advantages and disadvantages of advertising on television, social media and streaming sites are not only specific to the platform. These are instead largely governed by the consumer’s perception of advertising in general. The consumer’s sense of freedom to choose their own content has contributed to the increased popularity of streaming sites. It is clear from the study that TV-viewing has changed as more individuals engage in multi-screen behavior while watching TV. Finally, it is stated in the study that it is not only social media and streaming sites that affect the importance of TV-commercials. It also appears as though the consumers’ attitude to TV-advertising in turn has influenced their attitude towards advertising on social media and streaming sites.