Scalable video coding over RTP and MPEG-2 transport stream in broadcast and IPTV channels

The ITU-T and ISO/IEC standard for scalable video coding was recently finalized. SVC allows for scalability of the video bitstream in the temporal, spatial, or fidelity domain, or any combination of those. Video scalability may be used for different purposes, such as saving bandwidth when the same media content is required to be sent simultaneously on a broadcast medium at different resolutions to support heterogeneous devices, when unequal error protection shall be used for coverage extension in wireless broadcasting, as well as for rate shaping in IPTV environments. Furthermore, it may also be useful in layered multicast transmission over the Internet or peer-to-peer networks, or in any transmission scenario where prioritized transmission for network flows is meaningful. In order to make usage of SVC in the aforementioned use cases, standards for defining the transport format and procedure are required. Therefore, we give a detailed overview of the recently finished SVC standards on transport over IP/RTP and the MPEG-2 transport stream. Both standards are important for IPTV and video on demand, where the first is important for SVC transport over mobile broadcast/multicast channels, and the latter is also important for SVC transport over traditional digital broadcast channels.