New insights on internet streaming and IPTV

The Internet witnessed its traffic evolved from text and images based traditional Web content to more multimedia rich applications in the past decade. As a result, multimedia and Internet streaming technology have become an increasingly important building block to many Internet applications, ranging from remote education, digital radio, Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), etc. This paper discusses the fundamental issues in Internet streaming delivery and associated technical challenges. It emphasizes the architecture and system differences between streaming applications and traditional Web applications. It reviews our research experience and presents lessons learned in this area as well as points out directions for future work.