Video adaptation for consumer devices: opportunities and challenges offered by new standards

Video and multimedia streaming services continue to grow in popularity and are rapidly becoming the largest consumers of network capacity in both fixed and mobile networks. In this article we discuss the latest advances in video compression technology and demonstrate their potential to improve service quality for consumers while reducing bandwidth consumption. Our study focuses on the adaptation of scalable, highly compressed video streams to meet the resource constraints of a wide range of portable consumer devices in mobile environments. Exploring SHVC, the scalable extension to the recently standardized High Efficiency Video Coding scheme, we show the bandwidth savings that can be achieved over current encoding schemes and highlight the challenges that lie ahead in realizing a deployable and user-centric system.