New technologies for video streaming: a series of patents for Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA at the University of Klagenfurt

Six patent applications have already been registered by the ATHENA laboratory this year, with the most recent being granted in June 2024. The technologies protected by the patents were developed in collaboration between the University of Klagenfurt and Bitmovin. A total of 15 researchers are currently working on innovations in video streaming at the Christian Doppler Laboratory.

“Our aim in video streaming research is to deliver videos to users in the most efficient way and with the highest possible quality. We are addressing this challenge on a number of different levels,” says Christian Timmerer, Head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory. Thanks to the latest developments, the team has made significant progress towards these goals.

There is potential for further optimisation, for example, in how the servers provide the videos. ” Generally, five to six versions, sometimes as many as 15 versions, are provided with varying levels of quality, which are then deployed depending on the recipient. These versions require preparation, we call this step encoding. A specific method developed by our research group now allows the parameters applied to one version of a video to be extended to the dependent variants. The aim is to accelerate this stage,” Christian Timmerer explains. But there are also innovations for the video recipients, as Timmerer goes on to explain: “Until recently, the client decided which version to download – via the TV set, smartphone or tablet. We have outsourced this decision to an edge node. These are base stations located near the users. Overall, this also allows us to increase efficiency.“

The volume of resources required for video transmission also depends on the complexity of the videos. A cartoon with simple colours is easier to encode in terms of resources than videos containing a great deal of detail. Applying the same coding parameters everywhere would be inefficient: Unnecessary resources would be wasted on cartoons, while quality would be lost on detailed videos. Christian Timmerer explains: “Netflix is now encoding individual video sequences depending on the video complexity. This works really well for video on demand. The relatively high resource consumption pays for itself thanks to the large number of downloads.” The ATHENA team wanted to transfer the idea of complexity-dependent coding to live video. And this has now been achieved: “Using machine learning, the new technology can quickly determine the video complexity and then encode the video accordingly. The customisation is dynamic. We were able to show that this works for different frame rates – from 24 to 30 frames/second for conventional applications up to 120 frames/second for special, high-resolution images,” says Christian Timmerer.

The Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA is jointly funded by Bitmovin and the Christian Doppler Research Association, with the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs acting as the main public funding body. The budget for 7 years of research is around 4.5 million euros; Some 2.7 million of this comes from the public sector. ATHENA is based at the Department of Information Technology at the University of Klagenfurt.

For an overview of the latest patent applications, please visit https://athena.itec.aau.at/?s=patent.

The ATHENA lab recently completed a 5-year evaluation. A summary of their accomplishments can be found in the following article: Successful 5-year Evaluation of Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA | ATHENA Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory (aau.at)