New Mosaic Solution Enables Infinite Streaming

Tiledmedia’s New Mosaic Solution Enables Infinite Streaming

Imagine being able to decide which camera angle you want to watch during a football game. Imagine being able to follow your favourite F1 driver during the race broadcast. Or – imagine watching multiple sporting events on one screen at the same time. This is exactly the capability that the customers can now deliver in their streaming services.

Tiledmedia’s “Mosaic” solution makes (sports) streaming highly customizable. Viewers can select how many streams – and which streams – they want to watch on the screen of their device. And it’s not just for headsets: this cool new solution is available for mobile devices, tablets, smart TVs, and set-top boxes.

Mosaic functionality supports streaming live or on-demand events with multiple camera feeds. It also allows streaming of multiple unconnected events at the same time, like watching the F1 race while keeping an eye on the football match that is happening at the same time. Or maybe three football matches.

With Mosaic, streaming providers can offer their users many simultaneous “rectangular” video feeds. They can then let them choose which of these feeds is – or are – shown large. Mosaic allows mixing and matching rectangular videos with VR180/360 videos. These feeds can be either raw camera feeds or director-edited.

How does it work for the viewer?

As an example, there might be 8 small videos and one large video playing on the device. A sports fan watches an official football broadcast, and then wishes to go to a view of the camera closest to the opponent’s goal. They click on the little video for the goal, and that video is immediately displayed large, while the broadcast feed goes to a smaller view. Users can continuously follow their favourite athlete in multi-camera events, such as car races, cycling, track & field, golf, etc. The end-user experience is highly engaging and completely personalized.

What Makes Tiledmedia’s Mosaic Unique

Personalized and interactive viewing experience

Sports audiences keep getting more and more demanding, asking for an active sports experience. The Mosaic solution allows viewers to make individual decisions on which camera feeds they will be watching large, which small, and which not at all. For example, it allows the viewer to always have the on-board camera of their favourite F1 driver in view. Or to follow their favourite high jump event in a field and track championship. It makes the viewing experience highly interactive and personalized for the end-user.

Instant switching between camera feeds

With Mosaic, your audience will have seamless instant switching between camera feeds, so the viewing experience is truly first-class. There is accurate sync between the camera feeds, so fans do not need to fear missing out on the live action, even in fast-paced sports. When watching a sports event through multiple camera angles, it becomes extremely important to keep all camera feeds in exact sync.

Seamless audio switching

Tiledmedia’s Mosaic solution allows sports fans to enjoy continuous audio while switching between camera feeds for an event they are watching. Mosaic comes with “no-annoying-audio-hiccups” guarantee!

Social sync

All viewers can stay in perfect sync and see events precisely at the same time. The sync feature is available for both live streaming or VOD content that is scheduled to play at a set time. This allows co-viewing experiences, such as watching live sports together with friends, without any spoilers.

How does Mosaic relate to Tiledmedia’s VR offering?

Tiledmedia’s Mosaic solution is available for VR headsets, extending the “virtual jumbotron” that many customers use to have a much more flexible offering. They can now choose which camera to show in the Jumbotron, resize it, reposition it, and even turn it on and off. The VR solution suite is cross-platform, and many customers do indeed target mobile devices. The same applies to Mosaic: it can be used in headsets and on mobile devices. It can be combined with high-quality VR streaming or deployed stand-alone, without a VR feed. And indeed that is what we have done with Extreme E as provided in Sky Worlds: provide a headset experience with many “rectangular” feeds – as many as we could get.

Streaming only what the user sees

Tiledmedia’s Mosaic solution shares a number of key technical characteristics with ClearVR:

• There is only a single transcode of all feeds, into a number of representations.
• The client (application) retrieves only the streams that the user needs, at the resolution that they are displayed.
• Mosaic does not rely on any server component for personalisation. It’s all done by simple http streaming.
• Mosaic requires only one single decoder no matter how many streams are watched and no matter the resolution the user needs.
• Because it only requires a single decoder, Mosaic is completely straightforward to deploy cross-platform.
• The client-side SDK handles all personalisation. It can retrieve, configure and display the feeds however the user wants to arrange them.

The challenges of tiled VR streaming and Mosaic are essentially the same: handling many individual streams simultaneously. Efficiently distributing pixels at the resolution they are being consumed. Cross-platform, and with zero server complexity.

The same technology can be used for mobile devices, Set-Top Boxes and Smart TVs. With younger generations looking for more active viewing experiences than what is currently on offer, Mosaic creates additional value to direct-to-consumer providers. While content is king, new streaming services can do away with the constraints of traditional, linear television – even when used on a TV set. Viewers become more and more demanding on their paid services and expect to be able to customize the service according to their own taste.

What are the benefits for the streaming provider?

Mosaic creates a highly personalized streaming experience, so it serves both hardcore fans, who expect a richer and more extensive viewing experience, and the younger demographic who like to stream on the go and with multiple devices. This allows streaming providers to reach the generation that is shifting away from watching TV, and of course, to create more stickiness to the service and more satisfied customers.

When they deploy Mosaic, streaming service providers can benefit from rich, aggregate data on what views and streams users prefer, allowing them to serve their customers much better.

Rights holders can increase fan engagement and extract greater value out of their content. Tiledmedia’s Mosaic is significantly more flexible in terms of transcoding, distribution and app development than any of the solutions currently on the market. For example, there are no constraints on how many feeds you can allow the viewers to have on one screen at the same time. There is also no constraint on which streams they watch simultaneously – there are no predetermined, fixed, server-provided configurations. The simplicity and flexibility of Mosaic comes from the fact that the streams only need to be encoded once while the client-side handles all personalisation. With Mosaic, you can offer experiences that go way beyond traditional broadcast TV, and cater to the individual viewing preferences and tastes.

If you are interested in hearing more, reach out to mimi (at) tiledmedia.com or message us here.