Enabling on-demand internet video streaming services to multi-terminal users in large scale

摘要

In the ubiquitous era of streaming multimedia over the Internet, an increasing number of users are accessing to Internet video services through varieties of terminals, e.g PC, Set-Top Box IPTV and mobile phones, etc. Whereas extending streaming media to multiple ends adds much to consumer electronic industry, the challenge remains on how to provide on-demand services to heterogeneous users with different bandwidth requirement, access manner, QoS demand, etc. The success of a large-scale video streaming system relies heavily on how they address the critical issues in QoS, scalability and heterogeneity, yet no single system has delivered the expected scale and quality for commercial applications. Thus this paper provides a complete portfolio of solutions for providing multiple Internet video streaming services (live video broadcast, video on demand, video downloading) on 3 Screens (PC, TV, mobile), through a unified Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video platform. Upon manageable P2P framework, different terminals access are supported and end user bandwidth are utilized to scale the system. With our multi-process server management, efficient topology organization, enhanced UDP transmission and intelligent content distribution, our P2P streaming media platform is proved to have lower operation cost and higher user quality. The significance of such paper lies not only in the proposed system framework and on-field engineering techniques to enable an enterprise-grade and telecom-class application, but also the industrial insights inside designing such commercialized large-scale platform with full consideration of function, process, configuration and cost1.