A journey towards fully immersive media access

Abstract

Universal media access (UMA) as proposed almost two decades ago is now reality. We can generate, distribute, share, and consume any media content, anywhere, anytime, and with/on any device. A technical breakthrough was the adaptive streaming over HTTP resulting in the standardization of MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), which is now successfully deployed in a plethora of environments. The next big thing in adaptive media streaming is virtual reality applications, and specifically, omnidirectional (360-degree) media streaming, which is currently built on top of the existing adaptive streaming ecosystems. This tutorial provides a detailed overview of adaptive streaming of both traditional and omnidirectional media. The tutorial focuses on the basic principles and paradigms for adaptive streaming as well as on already deployed content generation, distribution, and consumption workflows. Additionally, the tutorial provides insights into standards and emerging technologies in the adaptive streaming space. Finally, the tutorial includes the latest approaches for immersive media streaming enabling six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) DASH through Point Cloud Compression (PCC) and concludes with open research issues and industry efforts in this domain.