{"id":688023,"date":"2020-08-28T07:52:41","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T14:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=688023"},"modified":"2020-10-01T16:05:26","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T23:05:26","slug":"levelup-a-thin-cloud-approach-to-game-livestreaming","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/levelup-a-thin-cloud-approach-to-game-livestreaming\/","title":{"rendered":"LevelUp: A thin-cloud approach to game livestreaming"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Game livestreaming is hugely popular and growing. Each month, Twitch hosts over two million unique broadcasters with a collective audience of 140 million unique viewers. Despite its success, livestreaming services are costly to run. AWS and Azure both charge hundreds of dollars to encode 100 hours of multi-bitrate video, and potentially thousands each month to transfer the video data of one gamer to a relatively small audience.<\/p>\n

In this work, we demonstrate that mobile edge devices are ready to play a more central role in multi-bitrate livestream- ing. In particular, we explore a new strategy for game livestream- ing that we call a thin-cloud approach. Under a thin-cloud approach, livestreaming services rely on commodity web infrastructure to store and distribute video content and lever- age hardware acceleration on edge devices to transcode video and boost the video quality of low-bitrate streams. We have built a prototype system called LevelUp that embodies the thin-cloud approach, and using our prototype we demonstrate that mobile hardware acceleration can support real- time video transcoding and significantly boost the quality of low-bitrate video through a machine-learning technique called super resolution. We show that super-resolution can improve the visual quality of low-resolution game streams by up to 88% while requiring approximately half the band- width of higher-bitrate streams. Finally, energy experiments show that LevelUp clients consume only 5% of their battery capacity watching 30 minutes of video.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Game livestreaming is hugely popular and growing. Each month, Twitch hosts over two million unique broadcasters with a collective audience of 140 million unique viewers. Despite its success, livestreaming services are costly to run. AWS and Azure both charge hundreds of dollars to encode 100 hours of multi-bitrate video, and potentially thousands each month to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13547],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-688023","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2020-11-1","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/08\/levelup-sec20.pdf","id":"695769","title":"levelup-sec20","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[{"id":695769,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/10\/levelup-sec20.pdf"},{"id":688026,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/08\/levelup-aug20.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Landon Cox","user_id":37527,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Landon Cox"},{"type":"text","value":"Lixiang Ao","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144899,715138],"msr_project":[212082],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":212082,"post_title":"Edge Computing","post_name":"edge-computing","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2020-02-23 16:44:03","post_modified":"2020-11-12 19:40:46","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/edge-computing\/","post_excerpt":"Industries ranging from manufacturing to healthcare are eager to develop real-time control systems that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve efficiencies and reduce cost. 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