Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.

Digital Watermarking

User Generated Content (UGC) is re-shaping the way people watch video and TV, with millions of video producers and consumers. In particular, UGC sites are creating new viewing patterns and social interactions, empowering users to be more creative, and developing new business opportunities. To better understand the impact of UGC systems, we have analyzed YouTube, the world's largest UGC VoD system. Based on a large amount of data collected, we provide an in-depth study of YouTube and other similar UGC systems. In particular, we study the popularity life-cycle of videos, the intrinsic statistical properties of requests and their relationship with video age, and the level of content aliasing or of illegal content in the system. We also provide insights on the potential for more efficient UGC VoD systems (e.g. utilizing P2P techniques or making better use of caching). Finally, we discuss the opportunities to leverage the latent demand for niche videos that are not reached today due to information filtering effects or other system scarcity distortions. Overall, we believe that the results presented in this paper are crucial in understanding UGC systems and can provide valuable information to ISPs, site administrators, and content owners with major commercial and technical implications.

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I tube, you tube, everybody tubes: analyzing the world's largest user generated content video system

An interactive television program guide with remote access is provided. The interactive television program guide is implemented on interactive television program guide equipment. A remote program guide access device is connected to the interactive television program guide equipment by a remote access link to provide a user with remote access to program guide functions. An interactive television program guide system based on multiple user television equipment devices in a single household is provided. The system provides a user with an opportunity to adjust program guide settings with a given one of the interactive television program guides. Program guide setting include features related to setting program reminders, profiles, program recording features, messaging features, favorites features, parental control features, program guide set up features (e.g., audio and video and language settings), etc.

Interactive television program guide with remote access

A system for integrating video programming with the vast information resources of the Internet. A computer-based system receives a video program with embedded uniform resource locators (URLs). The URLs, the effective addresses of locations or Web sites on the Internet, are interpreted by the system and direct the system to the Web site locations to retrieve related Web pages. Upon receipt of the Web pages by the system, the Web pages are synchronized to the video content for display. The video program signal can be displayed on a video window on a conventional personal computer screen. The actual retrieved Web pages are time stamped to also be displayed, on another portion of the display screen, when predetermined related video content is displayed in the video window. As an alternative, the computer-based system receives the URLs directly through an Internet connection, at times specified by TV broadcasters in advance. The system interprets the URLs and retrieves the appropriate Web pages. The Web pages are synchronized to the video content for display in conjunction with a television program being broadcast to the user at that time. This alternative system allows the URLs to be entered for live transmission to the user.

Enhanced video programming system and method for incorporating and displaying retrieved integrated Internet information segments

A system and method for scheduling the receipt of desired movies and other forms of data from a network which simultaneously distributes many sources of such data to many customers, as in a cable television system. Customer profiles are developed for the recipient describing how important certain characteristics of the broadcast video program, movie or other data are to each customer. From these profiles, an 'agreement matrix' (908) is calculated by comparing the recipient's profiles to the actual profiles of the characteristics of the available video programs, movies, or other data. The agreement matrix (908) thus characterizes the attractiveness of each video program, movie, or other data to each prospective customer. 'Virtual' channels are generated from the agreement matrix (908) to produce a series of video or data programming which will provide the greatest satisfaction to each customer. Feedback paths (1020, 1024) are also provided so that the customer's profiles and/or the profiles of the video programs or other data may be modified to reflect actual usage, and so that the data downloaded to the customer's set top terminal (620) may be minimized. Kiosks (figure 11) are also developed which assist customers in the selection of videos, music, books, and the like in accordance with the customer's objective profiles.

System and method for scheduling broadcast of and access to video programs and other data using customer profiles

Massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) require low latency while supporting a large number of concurrent players, often sharing one worldwide instance of the game. As these are conflicting requirements, a common way of distributing load is by dividing the virtual environment into virtual regions. As MMOGs are world-spanning games, it is plausible to disperse these regions on geographically distributed servers. As such, we propose the use of core selection for finding an optimal server for placing a region, and support for migrating the game state to that server. The first goal relies on a set of servers and measurement of the interacting players latencies. In locating an optimal server, we anticipate a decrease in the overall latency for the majority of players. This reduction occurs by migrating the region to a server closer in proximity to the majority of players in that virtual region, thereby lowering the response time of any interaction.

Latency reduction by dynamic core selection and partial migration of game state

As the demand for mobile connectivity continues to grow, the need to evaluate the performance of Mobile Broadband (MBB) networks becomes stronger. In the last years, mobile “speed”, quantified most commonly by data rate, gained popularity as the most widely accepted metric to describe MBB performance. However, there is a lack of consensus on how mobile speed should be measured. In this paper, we design and implement MONROE-Nettest to dissect mobile speed measurements, and investigate the effect of different factors on speed measurements in the complex mobile ecosystem. MONROE-Nettest is built as an Experiment as a Service (EaaS) on top of the MONROE platform, an open dedicated platform for experimentation in operational MBB networks. Using MONROE-Nettest, we conduct a large scale measurement campaign and quantify the effects of measurement duration, number of TCP flows, and server location on measured downlink data rate in 6 operational MBB networks in Europe. Our results indicate that differences in parameter configuration can significantly affect measurement results. We provide the complete MONROE-Nettest software and our measurements as open data.

MONROE-Nettest: A configurable tool for dissecting speed measurements in mobile broadband networks

Video streaming is predicted to become the dominating traffic in mobile broadband networks. At the same time, adaptive HTTP streaming is developing into the preferred way of streaming media over the Internet. In this paper, we evaluate how different components of a streaming system can be optimized when serving content to mobile devices in particular. We first analyze the media traffic from a Norwegian network and media provider. Based on our findings, we outline benefits and challenges for HTTP streaming, on the sender and the receiver side, and we investigate how HTTP-based streaming affects server performance. Furthermore, we discuss various aspects of efficient coding of the video segments from both performance and user perception point of view. The final part of the paper studies efficient adaptation and delivery to mobile devices over wireless networks. We experimentally evaluate and improve adaptation strategies, multilink solutions, and bandwidth prediction techniques. Based on the results from our evaluations, we make recommendations for how an adaptive streaming system should handle mobile devices. Small changes, or simple awareness of how users perceive quality, can often have large effects.

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Adaptive media streaming to mobile devices: challenges, enhancements, and recommendations

This paper focuses on design issues for multimedia distribution architectures and the impact workload characteristics have on architecture design. Our contribution is an analysis of server load and user behavior in a news-on-demand environment, with focus on access patterns, popularity modeling, and the formation of traffic peaks. Finally, we evaluate an existing synthetic workload generator, MediSyn, and suggest some enhancements which will improve its suitability for news-on-demand workload modeling.

Workload Characterization for News-on-Demand Streaming Services

Following advice from the YouTube recommendation system is one of the ways users browse through the videos offered by YouTube. The system presents related videos based on several factors depending on the current video requested. This related videos list can be used by caching infrastructure to reduce network bandwidth consumption. In this paper, we analyze the differences between user-specific recommendation lists. We perform this analysis on 100s of user nodes from all around the world divided into 4 geographical regions using PlanetLab. Based on our analysis, we find that the related videos differ less in the top half (1-10) of the related video list offered by YouTube compared to the bottom half (11-20). Based on our analysis, we suggest that, caching or prefetching of the Top 10 of the related videos is advantageous over a period of time than caching the whole list offered by YouTube.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Latency reduction by dynamic core selection and partial migration of game state

MONROE-Nettest: A configurable tool for dissecting speed measurements in mobile broadband networks

Adaptive media streaming to mobile devices: challenges, enhancements, and recommendations

Workload Characterization for News-on-Demand Streaming Services

What should you cache?: a global analysis on YouTube related video caching