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Live Broadcast With Community Interactions: Bottlenecks and Optimizations

Recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of new live broadcast services, represented by Twitch.tv and YouTube live events, where videos are crowdsourced from amateur users (e.g., game players), rather than from commercial and professional TV broadcaster or content providers. The viewers also actively contribute to the content through embedded open-chat channels. Such community interactions among viewers, or even between broadcasters and viewers, make content generation highly diversified and engaging, particularly for the young generation. In this context, cross-viewer synchronization is highly desirable; otherwise the viewers with shorter broadcast latency may act as spoilers, significantly affecting the user experience of other viewers. In this paper, we show that the end-to-end delay has a dramatically amplified impact on the broadcast latency for individual viewers. We suggest smart rate adaptation to achieve cross-viewer synchronization, and develop distributed algorithms based on dual decomposition. We further extend our solution to the cloud environment, and present the concept of ShadowCast, which moves broadcasters to the cloud to provide high-quality streams beyond broadcasters’ network bandwidth constraint. Its practicability and effectiveness is demonstrated by our implementation and test bed experiments.