Adaptive multicast streaming

Adaptive streaming has become state of the art for video-on-demand (VoD) and unicast live-streaming. Existing services are based on HTTP, generally offering group-of-picture (GoP)-aligned segments of data in different qualities on an HTTP server for the client to choose from according to available bandwidth. For Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) or multicast video streaming in general, only solutions based on Scalable Video Coding are proposed, leading to increased overhead for each additional quality layer. Adaptive Multicast Streaming (AMS) uses alternating multicast addresses to offer multiple qualities without said overhead. Furthermore, the problem of when to switch to a higher quality is addressed with regard to uncertainty of available bandwidth.