Live Transcoding and Streaming-as-a-Ser...

Multimedia content delivery and real-time streaming over the top of the existing infrastructure is nowadays part and parcel of every media ecosystem thanks to open standards and the adoption of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as its primary mean for transportation. Hardware encoder manufacturers have adopted their product lines to support the dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP but suffer from the inflexibility to provide scalability on demand, specifically for event-based live services that are only offered for a limited period of time. The cloud computing paradigm allows for this kind of flexibility and provide the necessary elasticity in order to easily scale with the demand required for such use case scenarios. In this paper we describe bitcodin, our transcoding and streaming-as-as-ervice platform based on open standards (i.e., MPEG-DASH) which is deployed on standard cloud and content delivery infrastructures to enable high-quality streaming to heterogeneous clients. It is currently deployed for video on demand, 24/7 live, and event-based live services using bitdash, our adaptive client framework.