Christian Doppler Research Association approves ATHENA project proposal

ATHENA stands for Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and Emerging Networked Multimedia Services and has been jointly proposed by the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC; https://itec.aau.at) at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (AAU) and Bitmovin GmbH (https://bitmovin.com) to address current and future research and deployment challenges of HTTP adaptive steaming (HAS) and emerging streaming methods. AAU (ITEC) has been working on adaptive video streaming for more than a decade, has a proven record of successful research projects and publications in the field, and has been actively contributing to MPEG standardization for many years, including MPEG-DASH; Bitmovin is a video streaming software company founded by ITEC researchers in 2013 and has developed highly successful, global R&D and sales activities and a world-wide customer base since then.

The aim of ATHENA is to research and develop novel paradigms, approaches, (prototype) tools and evaluation results for the areas (1) multimedia content provisioning (i.e., video coding), (2) content delivery (i.e., multimedia networking) and (3) content consumption (i.e., HAS player aspects) in the media delivery chain as well as for (4) end-to-end aspects, with a focus on, but not being limited to, HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS). The new approaches and insights are to enable Bitmovin to build innovative applications and services to account for the steadily increasing and changing multimedia traffic on the Internet.The project has been approved by the Christian Doppler Research Association as a CD pilot laboratory — the first such kind of project at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt — with a duration of two years including a five year extension after successful review after the first two years (i.e., seven years in total). Thus, stay tuned for details and yes, I’m hiring PhD students for the areas above (detailed job description will be published soon).