e-Sports live: e-Sports relay broadcasting on demand

Abstract

Electronic Sports (e-Sports) is computer and video games played as competitive sports over the Internet and a local area network, and are provided to users through a TV relay broadcasting system and the Internet due to tremendous popularity of the e-Sports recently. The main drawback of the previous e-Sports relay is to broadcast the e-Sports selected by the provider without viewers' intention, and thus the viewers can not watch desired information. Accordingly, this paper proposes a message-based semi-interactive relay broadcasting system called e-Sports Live over the Internet. The proposed system captures all regions of playing a game, and transfers the regions to a client's viewer. The client can watch desired information by selecting a slice of all regions. However, transferring continually all regions to the client over the Internet leads to a high-traffic due to high-capacity of data. To reduce the traffic, the system transfers all messages occurred in the game such as movements of characters instead of transferring continually all areas, based on resources repetitively used in game such as the whole map and game characters, and the resources are repetitively transferred to the client's viewer in an initial stage. Consequently, the proposed system can reduce the traffic over the Internet by transferring only message, and can perform a semi-interaction by watching desire information, as the client's viewer receives all areas occurred in the game based on resources repetitively used in the game and messages. Now, our system can not apply to TV relay broadcasting, as it does not have buffers for resources, but may be utilized for a variety of fields of interactive TV. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.