Minimax disappointment criterion for video broadcasting

Users of media broadcasting services generally experience different grades of overall performance because of the non-uniform quality of their channel conditions. In order to provide all users equally satisfactory performance, we propose a new performance criterion named "minimax disappointment", based on layered service levels and the basic principle of joint source-channel coding. This criterion minimizes for all users the maximum value of performance degradation between the received performance and the expected optimal performance, given each user\´s individual channel situation. In support of this criterion, we develop two broadcasting systems and a gradient-based optimization scheme. Our systems achieve universally near-maximal performance for multiple user classes by providing layered service