UP J2L on Video Streaming

Mobile and broadband streaming

http://www.medialab.sonera.fi/projects/streaming

Streaming can be broadly defined as delivering multimedia content, such as video and audio, over the Internet. The end user's terminal is usually a PC with media player software, although many new home entertainment devices capable of receiving streams have also started to appear. As opposed to downloading, streaming allows the playback of media files before the entire file is received by the user. Streaming requires special servers that deliver the streams to users using protocols such as IP multicast, UDP, and RTSP, whereas standard Web servers and the HTTP protocol can be used for downloading. The biggest Internet streaming technology providers are RealNetworks and Microsoft.

By and large, mobile streaming means the delivery of multimedia content over mobile networks such as GSM, GPRS and W-CDMA. The end terminal is a mobile device, such as a PDA or smart phone that is capable of receiving streams. The streaming servers can be same that are used for the Internet streaming and therefore technology from RealNetworks, Microsoft and Apple can be used. Other companies, focusing only on mobile streaming, include PacketVideo, Emblaze, and Philips. Since mobile devices have small screens and data bandwidths in current mobile networks are rather limited, the content must be compressed much more than with delivery for PCs connected to the broadband Internet. Also, network delays and reliability issues cause more challenges than with pure Internet streaming.

posted by LJ Regalado @ 5:07 PM