With the continuous growth of digital television or broadcast multimedia, and/or broadband access, which may be used in conjunction with online businesses, social networks, and/or other online services and applications, users may desire having access to a larger number of providers and/or a broader range of content in a manner that is flexible and/or suits the users' lifestyles. Most users connect to the Internet using web browsers running on personal computers (PCs). Furthermore, most households may have one or more televisions that may be used to view television and/or multimedia broadcasts. Television broadcasts may include terrestrial TV, Cable-Television (CATV), satellite TV and/or Internet Protocol television (IPTV) based broadcasts. To ensure against unauthorized reception and/or use of TV and/or multimedia broadcast, service providers may require use of dedicated set-top boxes (STBs) that may be used to decrypt broadcast signals or provide conditional access to information communicated from the service providers to generate suitable video and/or audio streams that may be played via televisions and/or other display/playback devices in the household.
Services such as Cable TV and IPTV, which are offered by a service provider may run over managed networks for distribution since these services use multicast transport and require certain QoS features. In contrast, conventional streaming technologies such as Microsoft's Windows Media and Adobe's Flash may run over mostly unmanaged, this is, best-effort, networks. These streaming technologies may send the content to the viewer over a unicast connection through either a proprietary streaming protocol running on top of an existing transport protocol, mostly TCP and occasionally UDP, or the standard HTTP protocol that is over TCP.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.