Streaming and Over‐the‐Top TV

This chapter discusses the current and most widely deployed streaming technologies and how they are implemented in the marketplace. It reviews Apple's HTTP Live Streaming protocol and Microsoft's Smooth Streaming. The chapter describes the proprietary technology, Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS). It discusses dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) with the network interaction of streaming to technologies used to deliver this content cost‐effectively over the Internet. The chapter looks at the current top content providers and describes their implementations. Rapid advances in the marketplace, such as consolidations, HTML5, and other technical advances, will render some of this content out‐of‐date over time. The tolerance of users for poor quality has decreased, and they will abandon a stream and even a provider more quickly than before. Therefore, content providers must focus heavily on user satisfaction.