On media delivery protocols in the Web

A number of different approaches exist to deliver multimedia content to the end-user through the Web. Within classic client-server architectures, three main media delivery methods exist: HTTP download, real-time streaming, and HTTP streaming. The latter combines the advantages of both the HTTP download and the traditional streaming approach. In this paper, we provide an overview and analysis of two existing technologies which are based on HTTP streaming: Smooth Streaming and HTTP Live Streaming. Further, we propose an enhancement for HTTP Streaming, called BSD-based HTTP streaming. This enhanced media delivery technique works on an ordinary HTTP Web server, makes use of existing metadata specifications, and does not apply any restriction regarding the media formats used and the way media resources are organized on the server.