Characterization of 360-degree Videos

Online streaming of Virtual Reality and 360° videos is rapidly growing, as more and more major content providers and news outlets adopt the format to enrich the user experience. We characterize 360° videos by examining several thousand YouTube videos across more than a dozen categories. 360° videos, at first sight, seem to pose a challenge for the network to stream because of their substantially higher bit rates and larger number of resolutions. However, a careful examination of video characteristics reveals that there are significant opportunities for reducing the actual bit rate delivered to client devices based on the user's field of view. We study the bit rate and the motion in 360° videos, and compare them against regular videos by investigating several important metrics. We find that 360° videos are less variable in terms of bit rate, and have less motion than regular videos. Our expectation is that variability in the bit rates due to the motion of the camera in regular videos (or switching between cameras) is now translated to responsiveness requirements for end to end 360° streaming architectures.