Mobicast: a system for collaborative event casting using mobile phones

Lately, the usage of mobile live video streaming for video sharing has been growing steadily. However, because of the limitations presented by the capabilities of mobile phone video capturing devices, these video streams end up having either a low resolution or a small field of view. On the other hand, the ubiquity of video capture-capable mobile phones make the probability that more than one user will be recording the same scene from different views relatively high. In this paper we introduce a system for mobile live video streaming, named Mobicast, that enables the collaboration between multiple users streaming the same event from their mobile phones to provide a better collective viewing experience of the event to end viewers. We describe architectural components of the system that can be used in enhancing the viewing experience in different ways. Thereafter, we describe the details of an implementation of the system aiming at enhancing the viewing experience by stitching the incoming mobile video streams to construct a panoramic view in real-time. We performed a number of experiments, using both real-usage data and synthetically generated data, aiming at verifying that the system fulfills its promise of enhancing the viewing experience.