Efficient Live and on-Demand Tiled HEVC 360 VR Video Streaming

With 360° panorama video technology becoming commonplace, the need for efficient streaming methods for such videos arises. We go beyond the existing on-demand solutions and present a live streaming system which strikes a trade-off between bandwidth usage and the video quality in the user’s field-of-view. We have created an architecture that combines RTP and DASH to deliver 360° VR content to a Huawei set-top-box and a Samsung Galaxy S7. Our system multiplexes a single HEVC hardware decoder to provide faster quality switching than at the traditional GOP boundaries. We demonstrate the performance and illustrate the trade-offs through real-world experiments where we can report comparable bandwidth savings to existing on-demand approaches, but with faster quality switches when the field-of-view changes.