Delivering Layered Object-Based Media Using WebAssembly with Selective Cloud Rendering.

Traditional media is delivered using segmented video, with variable bitrates, over protocols such as MPEG-DASH. This works well for media experiences with a single, or very few, pre-produced variants. When the number of possible variants increases, however, it results in an explosion of pre-produced whole-experience videos in a one-per-variant relationship; this in turn causes high storage costs and poor re-use of otherwise separable media assets. The paradigm of object-based media (OBM) offers a solution by keeping media entities distinct after production, allowing them to be combined flexibly at the point of consumption. We examine the delivery and playback of OBM using a novel WebAssembly-based media player running in the browser. This approach allows the selective render offload of parts of an experience into the edge/cloud, by migrating associated code from the browser. Using three diverse exemplars of OBM we present a common meta-data format to capture flexible experiences, and measure the performance of our delivery pipeline in a range of on-device and offloaded scenarios. As far as we are aware this is the first such study of generalised OBM media delivery.