Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of networking, and, more particularly, to dynamically optimizing delivery of multimedia content over a network.
Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a set of specifications for implementing internet protocol (IP) based telephony and multimedia services over a network. IMS often uses Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocols such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). IMS networks utilize presence servers to store presence information of network users. Presence information indicates a user's communication devices (e.g., a laptop, a mobile phone, etc.) and capabilities of the devices (e.g., audio quality, video quality, instant messaging, etc.). Multimedia servers use presence information to optimize delivery of multimedia content to users. For example, if a user is able to receive audio content on a low fidelity device, it is not appropriate for a multimedia server to deliver a high quality audio stream. As another example, a user is able to receive video content on both a mobile phone and a laptop. The user initiates a video download on the mobile phone. The media server uses presence information to determine that it should deliver the video content to the laptop because the laptop has better video capabilities than the mobile phone.