Segment-of-Interest driven live game streaming: Saving bandwidth without degrading experience

Live game streaming is tremendously popular, and recent reports indicate that such platforms impose high traffic volume, leading to degraded user experience. In this paper, we propose a Segment-of-Interest (SoI) driven platform, so as to optimize live game streaming. Our platform uses various features collected from streamers and viewers to determine if the current segments of gameplays attract viewers. Upon determining the importance of individual segments, the limited bandwidth is allocated to the interested viewers in a Rate-Distortion (R-D) optimized manner, where the levels of segment importance are used as weights of game streaming quality. The underlaying intuition is: viewer experience is degraded only when the game streaming degradation is noticed by viewers. Simulation results show the benefits of our proposed solution: (i) it improves viewing quality by up to 5 dB, (ii) it saves bandwidth by up to 50 Gbps, and (iii) it efficiently performs resource allocation and scales to many viewers. Our presented testbed is opensource and can be leveraged by researchers and engineers to further improve live game streaming platforms.