Cable-TV-based home video streaming system: practice and experience

This article presents a practical home video streaming system that has actually been implemented and deployed for commercial services on a cable television network. Because streaming components and network connections of a cable TV network are considerably different from those of desktop streaming systems available on the Internet, traditional systems and techniques for video streaming are not enough for a cable TV network. Therefore, several special systems and server-centric streaming techniques have been developed for a cable TV network and home video clients. In particular, server-centric streaming techniques are crucial because a set-top box, which is the client in the case of a home video streaming system, lacks processing power. We have developed a highly efficient streaming server using network acceleration and data bypassing techniques. As a result, our state-of- the-art streaming server enables high scalability and provides various content navigation modes, including faster playback, to off-the-shelf set-top boxes.