FLAME partners TNO have presented the design and a first evaluation of a localized crowd-sourced live video streaming system now ready for the market. The localised crowd-sourced multimedia production and distribution system was tested on the FLAME platform with Bristol University.

The system enables mobile producers of multimedia content to serve their content in real-time to other nearby users, while at the same time drastically reducing the bandwidth as compared to traditional crowd-sourced multimedia services.

The system comprises a smartphone application and platform for producing and live-streaming live video content; use of edge computing and AI for platform optimisation and enhancing the user experience and a technical end user trial in Bristol using the edge-enabled FLAME network infrastructure.

The application and platform capitalise on some of the advantages of using edge processing, such as AI curated video feeds with object detection and categorization; low-latency streaming for a local and real-time experience and up to 93 percent bandwidth savings due to local processing.

Participants in the user trial on the FLAME infrastructure in Bristol were asked about their experience of the application, they rated the video quality and gave feedback on the application and AI-based filtering/categorization’s usefulness and accuracy.

The user evaluation further indicated that almost half of users (45%) enjoyed producing the content, an important prerequisite for prosuming apps to thrive.

A progress paper highlighting the findings was presented on this experiment at the ACM IMX conference, which was held virtually in June.

Access the paper here:  https://doi.org/10.1145/3391614.3399393

J.W. Kleinrouweler, E. Potetsianakis, L. D’Acunto.
‘Prosuming live multimedia content at the edge’,
IMX ’20: ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences, June 2020 Pages 160–164

For more info about the Prosumer framework read the project page or the TNO’s blogpost.