Asynchronous and reliable on-demand media broadcast

We discuss wireless broadcasting of multimedia streams within a framework that allows asynchronous media access. Receivers subscribe at any time to the ongoing broadcast session, but are still able to display the media stream from the beginning. A fully scalable broadcasting scheme is presented where the media stream is appropriately segmented, and segments are protected by fountain codes. Erasure-based decoding as well as soft decoding is discussed. Asynchronous data reception and full reliability are achieved at the same time. Depending on its receiving conditions, the receiver adapts its initial playout delay to guarantee high reliability of successful playout.