{"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 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