Towards a high efficient 360° video processing and streaming solution in a multiscreen environment

Immersive video has been around for some time but only recently the technology became more popular since affordable cameras with sufficient resolution as well as stitching software with reasonable quality became available to allow professionals and interested amateurs to create 360° movies. Networks became fast enough to allow end-users to stream 360° video content to their devices. Hardware on TVs, smartphones and tablets is sufficiently powerful to handle the content and react on view changes without noticeable delay. Most efforts in this area, however, have been aimed at the technical challenges creating and viewing of 360° content. As 360° video is starting to reach a wider audience, the need arises to pay attention to the use of such content in a realistic commercial environment. For this, two issues need to be addressed. The efficient distribution of 360° content and the added-value that it can bring content providers. We will address in this paper two main challenges a) the efficient streaming of high quality 360° video content using existing content delivery networks (CDNs) and without the need for additional bandwidth comparing to traditional video streaming and b) the playback of 360° content even on devices with limited processing resources and programmatic capabilities.