Social Backup and Sharing of Video using HTTP Adaptive Streaming

This paper is on social backup, sharing and remote access of video using HTTP Adaptive Streaming. A social backup is a backup at the location, and thus on the equipment, of (close) friends and family. Backups are created at friends’ locations, matching the hosting user’s interest with the content and taking into account the available bandwidth between the respective locations. A backup of high-quality video content can be done in segments. These segments allow, once distributed across various locations, remote access in a streaming fashion. This allows the bundling of upload speeds of various locations, making available enough bandwidth for streaming the content. Even then, bandwidth bottlenecks may still exist. Our prototype implementation shows two ways of dealing with this limitation. One is to request additional bandwidth from your friends, assuming they are willing to give you priority over other bandwidth usage. The other is to stream in lower quality, making use of the adaptive part of HTTP adaptive streaming.