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Over the past 10 years online video streaming has seen a tremendous increase in popularity, as it has become a great source of both entertainment and education. This increase in popularity has led to demands for higher quality streams, shorter buffering time and service adaptivity, based on the user’s personal prerequisites. These demands together with a constant increase in Internet usage have posed several challenges for streaming service providers to overcome. Within this master thesis an exploratory research and development project has been conducted. The project’s purpose has been to investigate common approaches, standards and trends related to establishing a multimedia streaming service. Based on the results from these investigations, the purpose has furthermore been to design and implement a proof-of-concept streaming server fulfilling the thesis internship company’s needs and requirements. Research has concluded that there are at least five vital components, which have to be carefully considered in order to establish a successful streaming service. These vital components are; the service system structure, the service application programming interface (API), the service hosting solution, the service data storage solution and finally the actual streaming module. Based on results from conducted investigations of common design approaches for each vital component, decisions for the thesis project implementation have been made. The resulting system has been built using the event-based system structure framework Node.js. A representational state transfer (REST) API has furthermore been implemented for managing client request routing. The resulting system has been implemented on a self-hosted server solution even though this is neither a preferred choice in theory nor common practice. The decision has however been made due to future plans at the thesis internship company of investing in a corporate-wide cloud-based server solution. For the service data storage solution the relation-based database management system MySQL has been implemented. For the final recognized vital component, the streaming module, support for HTTP-based multimedia streams has been implemented. This choice of technique has been made due to the many benefits brought on by using HTTP, such as cost efficiency and bandwidth optimization. The use of HTTP is also currently a trending choice of technique Thesis for Master’s Degree at HIT and LiU within the streaming community due to the recently published standard MPEG-DASH. |
