Survey and Gap Analysis for HTTP Streaming Standards and Implementations

With the explosive growth of the Internet usage and increasing demand for multimedia information on the web, media delivery over Internet attract substantial attention from media industry. To meet above requirements, HTTP Streaming technology is designed and gradually plays an important role in recent years. Several leading Standard Development Organizations (SDOs) have been producing a series of technical specifications to define streaming over HTTP. Moreover, several companies have devoted to developing private HTTP-based media delivery platform to provide high quality, adaptive viewing experience to customers. Following a brief survey of existing HTTP streaming standards and implementations, this document gives a brief summary on these related work, analyzes the potential challenges especially from the network point of view, and lists the gap between existing work and possible working scope on the topic of HTTP streaming in IETF.