KOM player-a platform for experimental VoD research

In contrast to audio which is often streamed as complete music titles or even as a life feed from a radio station, video in today´s Internet is almost only available as small clips and pre-generated programs. Although some of the problems concerning AV streaming are reasonably solved right now, some work in fields like wide area distribution systems need further investigation to make applications like “true video-on-demand” work. Our research and the one of many others is focused on problems that have to be solved to make application like VoD work in the Internet. It is mainly concerned with wide area distribution. We present a platform for experimental VoD research which is thought to support researchers working on VoD and wide area distribution for audio and video content. This platform offers researchers the possibility to implement their ideas without building a complete streaming environment and in addition allows the combination of different implementations. After motivating the development of our platform we present the design of our platform, give an overview of the actual implementation and the existing components that we have already built. Finally, example scenarios for the use of our platform in research are given