Design and Proof-of-Concept Implementation of Interactive Video Streaming with DASH.js

Abstract: Traditionally, videos are played in a linear manner, which does not give the viewer many options to control their viewing experience. However, in contrast to regular video this paper presents the design and implementation of a proof-of-concept solution that supports interactive video streaming. The idea with interactive video streaming is that the viewer can personalize their experience by deciding which path a story should follow at certain branch points. The challenge is to give the user this experience while simultaneously keeping the seamless playback experience they usually have when streaming video in a traditional way. By doing careful prefetching of the alternative videos in conjunction with utilizing the concept of HTTP-based adaptive streaming, seamless playback of interactive branched video can be implemented with the  dynamic adaptive streaming over a HTTP (DASH) framework. We compare our proof-of-concept implementation with a previous implementation from a different framework. The two players are tested against each other in a handful test aimed at exploring some of the aspects specific to interactive video. More specifically, we investigate the likelihood of experience "stalls", events that cause seamless playback to be interrupted, when changing the network conditions as well as when we change the nature of the so called "branch events" themselves. We find that there are distinguishable differences between the two implementations, specifically that DASH implementation has a more optimistic adaptation logic causing it to have more stalls and a higher playback rate in general.