and Directions

Abstract—Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and increasing demand for multimedia information on the web, streaming video over the Internet has received tremendous atten-tion from academia and industry. Transmission of real-time video typically has bandwidth, delay, and loss requirements. However, the current best-effort Internet does not offer any quality of ser-vice (QoS) guarantees to streaming video. Furthermore, for video multicast, it is difficult to achieve both efficiency and flexibility. Thus, Internet streaming video poses many challenges. To address these challenges, extensive research has been conducted. This special issue is aimed at dissemination of the contributions in the field of streaming video over the Internet. To introduce this special issue with the necessary background and provide an integral view on this field, we cover six key areas of streaming video. Specifically, we cover video compression, application-layer Qo