An AI-Based Collaborative Video Streaming Platform for VoD *
AptStream is a revolutionary AI-based video streaming platform that significantly reduces the cost of streaming Video-on-Demand contents. The upcoming platform leverages multiple technologies to deliver the best-in-class video streaming experience to the users. AptStream allows entities providing various types of video streaming services, to substantially reduce their streaming costs by efficient management of the traffic in their networks, without the burdens of migrating to a new platform. It will also help eliminate one of the current issues of streaming video over the Internet, that is network congestion during busy hours — an issue that was exacerbated during the recent pandemic.
Platform Specifications
Minimizing Video Data Transmissions from Data Centers and CDNs: The main capability of AptStream is minimizing the amount of video data that is transmitted from data centers and/or CDNs to the viewers. The amount of reduction will depend on the use case, but it can lead to ~90% reduction for a video content in a typical scenario.
Quality of Service (QoS): AptStream achieves improvements in the QoS of the streaming service compared to solely using the video hosting platform. This is partly due to the fact that AptStream helps reduce network congestions. In a worst case scenario, the platform will always be able to fall back to the original platform, namely the data center/CDN.
Scalability and Cost Efficiency: AptStream is capable of handling a large number of viewers with minimum amount of added costs. In fact, based on our experiments, the added cost per viewer is so low that it can be neglected.
Ease of Use: AptStream is easy to implement. It does not require any migration process, and works on top of any currently used video hosting solution. In addition, the viewers do not need to install any additional software, plug in, or the like. and they do not need any special hardware.
Privacy and Security: Since the users of this platform might be providing sensitive contents, built in privacy and security features are integrated into AptStream.
Performance Monitoring: One of the important needs of major VoD content providers is the ability to monitor the performance of the streaming platform. As such an integrated performance monitoring system is integrated into AptStream.
* This project is partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
