Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. Streaming refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content itself.
Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery network (CDN), a cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services. Akamai's Intelligent Edge Platform is one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms. The company operates a network of servers around the world and rents out capacity on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations near the user. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is directed by Akamai's domain name system to a proximal edge server that can serve the requested content. Akamai's mapping system assigns each user to a proximal edge server using sophisticated algorithms such as stable matching and consistent hashing, enabling more reliable and faster web downloads. Further, Akamai implements DDoS mitigation and other security services in its edge server platform.
A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. CDNs came into existence in the late 1990s as a means for alleviating the performance bottlenecks of the Internet as the Internet was starting to become a mission-critical medium for people and enterprises. Since then, CDNs have grown to serve a large portion of the Internet content today, including web objects, downloadable objects, applications, live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media sites.
Internet 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 almost immediately. This is known as streaming media.
Speedera Networks, founded in 1999, was a content delivery network (CDN) company that emerged in the late 1990s to advance technology applications for Internet communications and collaboration and became the first CDN to turn a profit. On June, 2005, Akamai acquired Speedera Networks.
Limelight Networks is an American company that provides a content delivery network (CDN) service, used for delivery of digital media content and software. As of February 2020, the company's network has more than 130 points-of-presence and delivers with 70+ Terabits per second of egress capacity across the globe.
Xunlei Limited is a Chinese multinational technology company and an online service provider founded in 2003. The subsidiary of Xunlei Limited, Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies, Co., Ltd. was formerly known as Sandai Technologies (Shenzhen) Inc. and changed its name to Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies, Co., Ltd. in May 2005. Its headquarters are in Nanshan District, Shenzhen.
Highwinds Network Group, Inc. (Highwinds) is a company that was founded in 2002 and offers IP services including CDN, cloud storage, IP transit, transport and colocation. The company headquarters are located in Winter Park, Florida, United States. Highwinds maintains Network Operations Centers (NOCs) in Winter Park, FL, Phoenix, AZ, and Amsterdam, Netherlands as well as offices in Costa Mesa, CA, São Paulo, Brazil and London, England. The Highwinds network, called RollingThunder, consists of more than 70 points of presence throughout North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Highwinds provides video streaming services to media companies including Blip.TV and Hudl, delivers online games for publishers such as Valve and CCP Games and distributes advertising assets for leading platforms including Facebook's LiveRail.
AWS Elemental, formerly known as Elemental Technologies, is a software company headquartered in Portland, Oregon and owned by Amazon Web Services that specializes in multiscreen video. Founded in August 2006, Elemental creates software that performs video encoding, decoding, transcoding, and pixel processing tasks on commodity hardware for adaptive bitrate streaming of video over IP networks. Elemental video processing software runs in turnkey, cloud-based and virtualized deployment models. The company has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, China, Russia, India and Brazil.
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) operated by Amazon Web Services. Content delivery networks provide a globally-distributed network of proxy servers that cache content, such as web videos or other bulky media, more locally to consumers, thus improving access speed for downloading the content.
ChinaCache is a provider of Internet content and application delivery services in China. It was founded in 1998. Through its 3-tier Internet ecosystem, ChinaCache also offers Internet data center management, Internet Exchange operations and cloud hosting services. ChinaCache's network is interconnected with those operated by the three dominating telecom carriers and local Internet service providers in China.
Edgecast Networks, Inc., formerly Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS), is a subsidiary of Yahoo Inc. and provider of content delivery network (CDN) and video streaming services. It was founded in 2006 and received funding from the venture arm of The Walt Disney Company, Steamboat Ventures. The company was headquartered in Los Angeles, California. It was rebranded as Edgecast in September 2021, following Apollo Global Management's acquisition of 90% of Verizon Media, which in turn became the current incarnation of Yahoo. In March 2022, Limelight Networks announced its intention to acquire Edgecast; once the deal is complete, the merged companies will operate as Edgio.
Tata Communications Limited is an Indian telecommunications company previously known as Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL). It was previously a government- owned-telecommunications service provider and under the ownership of Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications, Government of India. It was sold by Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications, Government of India to Tata Group when Atal Bihari Vajpayee-Bharatiya Janta Party-National Democratic Alliance was in power. Presently the company is part of the Tata Group.
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small segments, which are served over HTTP. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sport event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of playback time. While the content is being played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client uses a bit rate adaptation (ABR) algorithm to automatically select the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for playback without causing stalls or re-buffering events in the playback. The current MPEG-DASH reference client dash.js offers both buffer-based (BOLA) and hybrid (DYNAMIC) bit rate adaptation algorithms. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions and provide high quality playback with few stalls or re-buffering events.
Abbas Rajabifard is a Professor and the Director of Smart and Sustainable Development and Discipline Leader of Geomatics Department of Infrastructure Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also the Director of the Center for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration (CSDILA).
An online video platform (OVP), provided by a video hosting service, enables users to upload, convert, store and play back video content on the Internet, often via a structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users generally will upload video content via the hosting service's website, mobile or desktop application, or other interfaces (API). An example of an OVP is YouTube. The type of video content uploaded might be anything from shorts to full-length TV shows and movies. The video host stores the video on its server and offers users the ability to enable different types of embed codes or links that allow others to view the video content. The website, mainly used as the video hosting website, is usually called the video-sharing website.
Instart was an American multinational computer technology corporation, headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company specialized primarily in developing and marketing a Digital Experience Cloud that improves web and mobile application performance, consumer experience and security. The company marketed and sold to large enterprises that seek to achieve higher digital revenue, increased on-line conversion, faster website performance, improved consumer experience and better online security.
Netflix is an American-based company that offers a service for streaming movies and TV series over the Internet. Several technical innovations were required to provide it.
Fastly is an American cloud computing services provider. It describes its network as an edge cloud platform, which is designed to help developers extend their core cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users. The Fastly edge cloud platform includes their content delivery network (CDN), image optimization, video and streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services. Fastly's cloud security services include denial-of-service attack protection, bot mitigation, and a web application firewall. Fastly web application firewall uses the Open Web Application Security Project ModSecurity Core Rule Set alongside its own ruleset.
