Minimax disappointment criterion for video broadcasting

Users of media broadcasting services generally experience different grades of overall performance because of the non-uniform quality of their channel conditions. In order to provide all users equally satisfactory performance, we propose a new performance criterion named "minimax disappointment", based on layered service levels and the basic principle of joint source-channel coding [1]. This criterion minimizes for all users the maximum value of performance degradation between the received performance and the expected optimal performance, given each user's individual channel situation. In support of this criterion, we develop two broadcasting systems and a gradient-based optimization scheme. Our systems achieve universally near-maximal performance for multiple user classes by providing layered service.