SVC tunneling for media-aware content delivery: Impact on video quality

Today's omnipresent demand for access to multimedia content via diverse devices places new challenges on efficient content delivery. This work introduces the concept of Scalable Video Coding (SVC) tunneling developed in the EU FP7 ALICANTE project and shows that the quality impact of the transcoding steps for a transcoding chain from MPEG-2 to SVC and back to MPEG-2 accumulates to a PSNR reduction of up to 2.1 dB for transcoding at fixed target bitrate points. We also discuss research challenges and open issues in SVC tunneling.