Then, in the third section, the author will talk about the current problems faced due the streaming demands. This way the readers are exposed to the problem that has been puzzling Internet experts around the world while for the fourth section, the author will talk about video compression and formats. In the fifth section, readers will be exposed to the types of Internet protocols and why it is suitable as a set of rules for video streaming on the Internet. Finally, the author summarizes his points as well as to talk about the possibility of using better technologies and techniques to improve video streaming.
2. Background.
With the advent of the term QoS (Quality-of-Service), ISPs like AOL constantly improve their services as well as upgrading their servers so that they can gain more market shares from their competitors. QoS is a term used by the Internet industry that signifies a guaranteed throughput level of a networking technology. This term is more of an aim for network researchers to achieve the highest possible throughput to enable a more satisfying video streaming experience. They are also trying continually to create more and more video formats and codecs that can compress video data without compensating too much on quality. At the moment, popular video formats like MPG, DIVX, RAM and AVI are dominating the choice for downloading and streaming.
There are two types of compression, namely lossless compression and lossy compression. Lossless compression reduces the size of a file without losing any quality while lossy compression reduces the file size but at the expense of some minor quality. At the moment, video files can only be compressed using lossy compression, which we will discuss later the standards that apply this type of compression. Compression is done using special algorithms. These groups are part of the ISO organization, dealing with encoding and decoding video files.
