Twenty years ago, when the Internet was still very young, video streaming was virtually unheard of; the only activity ever done was uploading and downloading files and documents, which could only be accomplished by military personnel. Then, in the 90s, Internet became phenomenal; people started using it for chatting and such. As Internet technologies improve, people started demanding more. They wanted to be able to enjoy video and music using their computer. People now prefer streaming videos than to download the whole content from the Internet for later viewing. However, with the current Internet traffic, streaming can be quite slow that it frustrates the web surfer. Currently, most network researchers are striving to improve the Internet backbone so as to reach higher speed while minimizing data errors during data transmission.
Video streaming is crucial for video conferencing. It is part of the element for the concept e-commerce. Business dealings can be done face-to-face even if both parties cannot reach each other geographically. Now, the Internet experts are racing to develop the best technologies and techniques to satisfy the ever-growing pressure from the corporate world as well as from average home users to create a better video streaming experience as well as reducing the latency of delivering the results. This report is written for the sole purpose of evaluating all the current as well as future options to improve video streaming over high-speed network. Thus, the author will discuss the utilization of video compression techniques like MPEG2, MPEG4 and AVI. Follow up on this is the discussion on Internet protocols such as TCP, UDP, RSTP and etc.
There are a total of six sections including this introduction section in this report. The second section deals with the background on the above topics in order to allow readers to understand the terms as well as the history of the technologies/techniques mentioned above.
