Framework for Authoring and Delivery of Targeted Media Presentations Using a Smart Edge Proxy Cache

ABSTRACT

We propose a framework for authoring and delivery of targeted media streaming presentations using existing online media content. The framework includes an authoring component and a delivery component. The authoring component stitches different existing media sources into a continuous streaming presentation that is suitable for playback on a broad range of devices. The authoring component includes an offline transcoding subcomponent and a Just-in-Time packaging subcomponent to generate media presentations on-the-fly. The presentations generated are continuous and have excellent general device playback compatibility. However, even if content is identical, caching and distribution at scale be- comes challenging as each media segment may use different URI’s. To address this issue, we introduce a delivery component that uses a segment naming scheme to enable media deduplication of seg- ments in the edge cache proxy. In addition, a more generic caching scheme based on a Fowler – Noll – Vo version 1a content hash was implemented in the edge cache proxy. Both mechanisms can be used in combination with different adaptive streaming protocols. To illustrate the concept in practice, the smart edge cache proxy was implemented in a popular HTTP proxy accelerator. Evaluation of the framework using different targeted presentations shows that the edge cache avoids duplicate media caching and responds to requests without significant performance penalties. Further, the request overhead in the network is lower when comparing the naming scheme method to the content hashing-based approach.