Multimedia Broadcasting Techniques: Present Approaches and New Trends

This chapter presents several techniques for broadcasting multimedia data (audio and video) over the Internet. Internet broadcasting (also called webcasting) techniques have become very important in applications such as Internet (or Web) radio and television, real-time broadcasting of critical data (such as stock prices), distance learning, videoconferencing, and many others. We describe the current Internet broadcasting techniques including IP Unicast and IP Multicast, and we introduce a new technique IP Simulcast. The IP Simulcast approach is based on the hierarchical, binary structure of receivers, which at the same time become data senders or repeaters.