1Characteristics of Streaming Audio and Video Stored on the Internet

Abstract — The increasing power and connectivity of to-day’s computers have spurred the growth in streaming au-dio and video available on the Internet through the Web. While there is substantial research characterizing the per-formance of streaming media and characterizing documents stored on the Internet, there have been few studies charac-terizing streaming audio and video stored on the Web. We crawled over 17 million Web pages from key geographic lo-cations and extracted nearly 30,000 streaming audio and video clips for analysis. Using custom built tools, we an-alyzed the characteristics of these multimedia objects, de-termining such information as media type, encoding for-mat, playout duration, bitrate, resolution, and codec. We find proprietary audio and video from RealNetworks dom-inates all multimedia content, followed next by Microsof