Streaming video over the Internet: approaches and directions

| Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and increasing demand for multimedia information on the web, streaming video over the Internet has received tremendous attention from academia and industry. Transmission of real-time video typically has bandwidth, delay and loss requirements. However, the current best-e ort Internet does not o er any quality of service (QoS) guarantees to streaming video. Furthermore, for video multicast, it is diÆcult to achieve both eÆciency and exibility. Thus, Internet streaming video poses many challenges. To address these challenges, extensive research has been conducted. This special issue is aimed at dissemination of the contributions in the eld of streaming video over the Internet. To introduce this special issue with the necessary background and provide an integral view on this eld, we cover six key areas of streaming video. Speci cally, we cover video compression, application-layer QoS control, continuous media distribution services, streaming servers, media synchronization mechanisms, and protocols for streaming media. For each area, we address the particular issues and review major approaches and mechanisms. We also discuss the trade-o s of the approaches and point out future research directions. Keywords| Internet, streaming video, video compression, application-layer QoS control, continuous media distribution services, steaming server, synchronization, protocol.