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

This special issue is concerned with the latest developments in state-of-the-art adaptive media streaming technologies and applications.

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Guest Editorial Adaptive Media Streaming

The concept of authenticating users e.g. by means of a login process is very well established and there is no doubt that it is absolutely necessary and helpful in a multiuser environment. Unfortunately specific information about a user originating a data stream or receiving it, is often no longer available at the traversed network nodes. This applies to the even more specific question of what application is used as well. Routers, gateways or firewalls usually have to base their classification of data on IP header inspection or have to try to extract information from the packets payload.We present an approach that works transparently and allows to associate user and application specific information with IP data streams by only slightly modifying components of the operating system environment and infrastructure components. On top of this framework we show usage scenarios for dedicatedly placing copyright information in media content and for an enhancement of the interoperation with the security infrastructure.

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Associating network flows with user and application information

Absrmcr- Content Distribution Networlts (CDNs) are bred On a static infrastructure, and caching and replication in CUNs are performed in a static manner. We argue that it is necessary to design future CDNs in such s aay that they are scalable tu reach enough customers, their costs are kept low, and they provide a Quality-of.-Service that satisfies the client requirements. To reach these goals, more flexibility is needed in CDNa. Flexibility will enrhle CDNs to perform faster and better decisions for caching and replication, and it will reduce the aniount of inanuul interwnlion that is necessary to manage and maintain the CDN. In this paper, we discuss the application of Peer-to-Peer mechanism in CDNs that support advanced caching and replication strategies and their combination with a dynamic QoS management hierarchy to reach the needed flexihility in CDNs.

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Towards scalable and affordable content distribution services

The problem of overbuffering in today's Internet (termed as bufferbloat) has recently drawn a great amount of attention from the research community. This has led to the development of various active queue management (AQM) schemes. The last years have seen a lot of effort to show the benefits of AQMs over simple tail-drop queuing and to encourage deployment. Yet it is still unknown to what extent AQMs are deployed in the Internet. In this paper, we present an end-to-end active measurement method to detect AQMs on the path bottleneck. We have developed an active measurement tool, named \emph{TADA}, and evaluated our measurement methodology on a controlled experimental testbed. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides the basis to identify whether an AQM is deployed on the bottleneck.

TADA: An Active Measurement Tool for Automatic Detection of AQM

Today, adaptive HTTP segment streaming is a popular way to deliver video content to users. The benefits of HTTP segment streaming include its scalability, high performance and easy deployment, especially the possibility to reuse the already deployed HTTP infrastructure. However, current research focuses merely on client side statistics like for example achieved video qualities and adaption algorithms. To quantify the properties of such streaming systems from a service provider point of view, we have analyzed both sender and receiver side logging data provided by a popular Norwegian streaming provider. For example, we observe that more than 90% of live streaming clients send their requests for the same video segment with an inter-arrival time of only 10 seconds. Moreover, the logs indicate that the server sends substantially less data than is actually reported to be received by the clients, and the origin server streams data to less clients than there really are. Based on these facts, we conclude that HTTP segment streaming really makes use of the HTTP cache infrastructure without the need to change anything in the parts of Internet that are not controlled by the streaming provider.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Guest Editorial Adaptive Media Streaming

Associating network flows with user and application information

Towards scalable and affordable content distribution services

TADA: An Active Measurement Tool for Automatic Detection of AQM

Analysis of a real-world HTTP segment streaming case