Nurogames has adopted SONATA integrated platform to improve its currently available live streaming products making them ready for the next generation of networks.
Nurogames GmbH is an independent game development and software engineering company that covers the entire value chain of game development, from the initial idea to the final product. It has a track record of more than 10 years of development of games for all major mobile, web, PC, console, VR, AR, and XR platforms.
“Thanks to the low latency we can achieve with SONATA, we have been able to advance NUROGAME’s real-time platform and develop a network device that can stream high-quality media with the plus of social media data”
(Jens Piesk, Nurogames CEO)
Nowadays, 5G networks can enhance the experience of end users regarding media services by providing not just high-quality live stream video into multiple 360 and non-360 degree environments, but also including additional content, like social media channels, to the live video streams. This allows the end users, for example, to enjoy sports events in a new dimension, creating an immersive experience.
Using SONATA NFV platform, Nurogames can deliver an adaptive and immersive end-to-end live streaming service as the combination of 360° in 4K streaming and AR/VR contents. With SONATA, Nurogames provides multiple live 360° streams to the users and the ability to choose to view one or multiple streams at the same time. The delivered streaming is adapted to the network and load condition of the end user device. Relying on DASH/HLS and an existing HTML5 adaptive player, the live-streams are platform and device agnostic, being the streaming adapted to the characteristics of such devices (Virtual Reality (VR) displays, mobile devices, smart TV and web applications). Apart from this, Nurogames has developed several VNFsfor various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other streaming platforms. Data gathered from Social Media (through Web-Sockets) is injected in the immersive experience (360° video streaming) before being delivered to the end user. By adopting SONATA, Nurogames can offer user’s analytics about the game and other additional info on top of the video that will enhance the immersivity of the experience.
All these features provide a hyper-personalized experience that can be delivered developing a personalized AR enrichment channel (manual and automatic personalisation of the experience, deciding contents to see, people to reach, etc.) with minimal hardware requirements from the end user devices. Besides, Nurogames can offer a high QoS to the end user thanks to the support of container-based Network Functions using Kubernetes and the deployment of multiple network slices, enabling a quicker automatic service deployment and facilitating scaling when needed.
TESTED SCENARIOS
Nurogames has developed and tested three different scenarios:
Single location streaming to a single user
This scenario includes one camera with a single user with the ability to add social networks to the stream.
Multi-location streaming to single or many users
This scenario involves multiple cameras streaming to a user with or without Social Media. The user has the ability to change the camera as he/she wishes.
Single location streaming with near real-time video analytics
This use case involves the Video Analysis to happen in real-time on the stream. This will give the user’s analytics about the game and other additional info on top of the video that will enhance the immersivity of the experience.
NETWORK SERVICES DEVELOPED
For these scenarios, Nurogames has developed a network service that consists on one camera with a single user with the ability to add social networks to the stream, every user can search, comment and like posts in the social media systems. The service is composed of several VNFs:
Content Management System
The Content Management System is the component that connects the cameras with the aggregators, with the Streaming Engines and the User. It is the entry point to the service, for content producers and final users, also has the database and all the logic of the service, like scalability.
Media Aggregator
Receives the video streams from the cameras and redirects those videos to the different media-streaming-engines or to another media-aggregator in another network node when needed.
Media Streaming Engine
This VNF implements the adaptive streaming algorithm, first transcodes the video to different qualities and then generates the HLS manifest (HTTP Live Streaming) and video fragments.
Social-Media-Service
The Social Media Service is the component that provides access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for the end user. Every user can search, comment and like posts in the social media systems.
Media-Aggregator-Stats
This VNF receives the statistics information from the Media Aggregator. There are statistics about the status of the VNF (the most important information is the uptime) and also statistics about the video service, such as lost frames or video bitrate. These statistics are processed and sent to the SONATA monitoring module.
Media-Streaming-Engine-Stats
This VNF receives the statistics information from the Media Streaming Engine. It works in the same way as the MAS VNF, but it contains more statistics about the video streaming, specifically about the adaptive streaming function. It is possible to extract statistics about the different qualities of the video, like number of clients or specific bitrates for each quality. These statistics are processed and sent to the SONATA monitoring module.
BENEFITS ACHIEVED
The bi-directional streaming service between various devices can be applied not only in the scenarios described above and deployed by Nurogames, but also in a number of contexts that make use of the VNFs to stream additional information to VR/AR/mobile devices or even industrial consoles that would potentially improve operational capacity of the user.
Thanks to SONATA, Nurogames has been able to improve the live video streams including additional content, like social media channels or user’s analytics, and offer live 360º streams to the users who can consume one or multiple streams simultaneously.