Video streaming

Article By:

Bajić, Ivan V. School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

Last reviewed:August 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.732075

The process of delivering digital video whereby it is continuously received by and presented to the user. Video streaming is the dominant technology for the delivery of digital video today. Television set-top boxes, computers, mobile devices, in-flight entertainment, and many other video systems rely on video streaming to deliver the video content for playout. Video communication applications differ in terms of their end-to-end delay (also known as latency) requirements. Some have very loose or no requirements in terms of latency, such as simple video file download. Others, such as videoconferencing, have very strict latency constraints and require video to be delivered within a few tens or at most hundreds of milliseconds. Video streaming occupies a large part of the latency requirements scale between these two extremes (Fig. 1). Loosely constrained video streaming applications include streaming of pre-stored video content such as movies on demand. An example of a more tightly constrained streaming application is live streaming. See also: Teleconferencing

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