Video on demandVideo on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access to videos, television shows and films without a traditional video playback device and a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of over-the-air programming was the most common form of media distribution. As Internet and IPTV technologies continued to develop in the 1990s, consumers began to gravitate towards non-traditional modes of content consumption, which culminated in the arrival of VOD on televisions and personal computers.
Real Time Streaming ProtocolThe Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is an application-level network protocol designed for multiplexing and packetizing multimedia transport streams (such as interactive media, video and audio) over a suitable transport protocol. RTSP is used in entertainment and communications systems to control streaming media servers. The protocol is used for establishing and controlling media sessions between endpoints.
YouTubeYouTube, LLC is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States. Accessible worldwide, it was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google and is the second most visited website, after Google Search. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. , videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute.
MulticastIn computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with physical layer point-to-multipoint communication. Group communication may either be application layer multicast or network-assisted multicast, where the latter makes it possible for the source to efficiently send to the group in a single transmission.
NetflixNetflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service owned and operated by Netflix, Inc. The service primarily distributes films and television series produced by the media company of the same name from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple languages. Netflix was launched on January 16, 2007, nearly a decade after Netflix, Inc. began its DVD-by-mail service. With 238.39 million paid memberships in more than 190 countries, it is the most-subscribed video on demand streaming service.
Real-time Transport ProtocolThe Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is a network protocol for delivering audio and video over IP networks. RTP is used in communication and entertainment systems that involve streaming media, such as telephony, video teleconference applications including WebRTC, television services and web-based push-to-talk features. RTP typically runs over User Datagram Protocol (UDP). RTP is used in conjunction with the RTP Control Protocol (RTCP). While RTP carries the media streams (e.g.
MP3MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Originally defined as the third audio format of the MPEG-1 standard, it was retained and further extended — defining additional bit-rates and support for more audio channels — as the third audio format of the subsequent MPEG-2 standard.
Advanced Audio CodingAdvanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate. AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC as part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 specifications. Part of AAC, HE-AAC ("AAC+"), is part of MPEG-4 Audio and is adopted into digital radio standards DAB+ and Digital Radio Mondiale, and mobile television standards DVB-H and ATSC-M/H.
Computer networkA computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies. The nodes of a computer network can include personal computers, servers, networking hardware, or other specialized or general-purpose hosts.
QuickTimeQuickTime is a discontinued extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built-into macOS, and was available for download on Windows until 2016. QuickTime was created in 1991, when the concept of playing digital video directly on computers was "groundbreaking.
Data compression ratioData compression ratio, also known as compression power, is a measurement of the relative reduction in size of data representation produced by a data compression algorithm. It is typically expressed as the division of uncompressed size by compressed size. Data compression ratio is defined as the ratio between the uncompressed size and compressed size: Thus, a representation that compresses a file's storage size from 10 MB to 2 MB has a compression ratio of 10/2 = 5, often notated as an explicit ratio, 5:1 (read "five" to "one"), or as an implicit ratio, 5/1.
Internet Protocol televisionInternet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded media, IPTV offers the ability to stream the source media continuously. As a result, a client media player can begin playing the content (such as a TV channel) almost immediately. This is known as streaming media. Although IPTV uses the Internet protocol it is not limited to television streamed from the Internet (Internet television).
Peer-to-peerPeer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. This forms a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.
MPEG-4MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC29/WG11) under the formal standard ISO/IEC 14496 – Coding of audio-visual objects. Uses of MPEG-4 include compression of audiovisual data for Internet video and CD distribution, voice (telephone, videophone) and broadcast television applications.
NapsterNapster was a file sharing application that originally launched on June 1, 1999 with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, and Hugo Sáez Contreras. As the software became popular, the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.
Digital videoDigital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images in the form of analog signals. Digital video comprises a series of s displayed in rapid succession, usually at 24, 30, or 60 frames per second. Digital video has many advantages such as easy copying, multicasting, sharing and storage. Digital video was first introduced commercially in 1986 with the Sony D1 format, which recorded an uncompressed standard-definition component video signal in digital form.
Lossy compressionIn information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storing, handling, and transmitting content. The different versions of the photo of the cat on this page show how higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to lossless data compression (reversible data compression) which does not degrade the data.
SmartphoneA smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone functions and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from older-design feature phones by their more advanced hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which facilitate wider software, access to the internet (including web browsing over mobile broadband), and multimedia functionality (including music, video, cameras, and gaming), alongside core phone functions such as voice calls and text messaging.
CodecA codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. Codec is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or data stream, and hence is a type of codec. Endec is a portmanteau of encoder/decoder. A coder or encoder encodes a data stream or a signal for transmission or storage, possibly in encrypted form, and the decoder function reverses the encoding for playback or editing.
PodcastA podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing. Podcasts are primarily an audio medium, with some programs offering a supplemental video component. Streaming applications and podcasting services provide a convenient and integrated way to manage a personal consumption queue across many podcast sources and playback devices.