Video delivery technologies for large-scale deployment of multimedia applications

Deployment of a large-scale multimedia streaming application requires an enormous amount of server and network resources. The simplest delivery technique allocates server resources for each specific request. This technique is very expensive and is not scalable to support a very large user community such as the Internet. Hence, the past decade has witnessed tremendous research efforts to facilitate cost-effective, large-scale deployment of multimedia streaming applications. In this paper, we describe three complementary research approaches: server transmission schemes using multicast, streaming strategies with application layer multicast, and proxy caching techniques. We discuss pros and cons of these technologies and provide our observations on current business solutions.