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HTTP Live Streaming standard in iPhone 3.0 OS
Brandon DavenportAt the March unveiling of iPhone 3.0, Apple only dropped a subtle hint about new streaming video features in the new operating system (literally limited to writing "streaming video" on the slide of other features, below), leaving out any details about how it would work and not even mentioning the feature in any detail in the presentation.
For the last decade, Apple has been selling QuickTime Streaming Server, which uses an RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) server to stream live or rebroadcast video feeds to viewers. Apple uses this technology to stream some of its own live events. However, despite offering royalty free streaming and also delivering it as an open source project, QuickTime's RTSP streaming server hasn't gained the traction it was once expected to achieve.
A large part of this is due to the fact that RTSP traffic is blocked by many firewalls, making it difficult to deliver streams reliably. The audio and video conferencing used by iChat also relies on RTSP, causing some users frustrating problems for the same reason. Getting RTSP video streaming to work on the iPhone would be even more difficult, as it routinely moves between mobile and WiFi networks.
Apple attempted to solve the RTSP problem long ago in QuickTime Streaming Server by creating an option to bundle up RTSP streaming video traffic into HTTP packets, which appear identical to standard web traffic and therefore are permitted through most firewalls. This involves a extra layer of overhead however, resulting in a greater demand for bandwidth. For the iPhone, Apple decided to pursue a different strategy, which it calls HTTP Live Streaming.
HTTP Live Streaming
The technology behind HTTP Live Streaming leaked into public knowledge in May when Apple submitted it to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a draft standard on track to become an RFC (or Request For Comments, the memorandum used by the Internet Society to define how technologies work in order to foster cooperation and compatibility between the vendors implementing them).
Apple's HTTP Live Streaming proposed draft looks a lot like a method Microsoft began selling last year, called Smooth Streaming. The difference is that Apple's proposed IETF standard can use anybody's encoder and broadcast server, and will work with any client software designed to receive the stream. In contrast, Microsoft's Smooth Streaming is of course designed to exclusively use Microsoft Expression Encoder, Microsoft Internet Information Server with a Smooth Streaming extension, and requires Microsoft's Silverlight 2 on the client.
Essentially, Apple wants a standard for streaming video that anyone can use so that it can continue selling hardware without being either shut out of the market by proprietary software, or held captive by it; Microsoft, as a software vendor, wants to create another captive market where it has the power to shut out competitors at its whim. In parallel to Microsoft's Silverlight Smooth Streaming, Adobe also offers an equivalent Flash-based streaming server of its own.
If this is all beginning to sound familiar, it's because video streaming has followed much of the same historical trajectory as multimedia playback, making the history of streaming another chapter in the history of QuickTime.
The advent of streaming
Back in the mid 90s, Apple's pioneering advancement of software-based desktop video authoring and playback gave the company a strong lead in multimedia computing. With the arrival of the Internet however, there seemed to be a huge potential for sending efficient streams of video to users (primarily over dial-up) instead of relying on CD-ROMs for distribution of large video files or expecting users to directly download huge videos over dial-up connections.
Internet media streaming was popularized by Progressive Networks in 1995 with its proprietary RealAudio streaming format. In 1997, the company was renamed RealNetworks and launched a RealVideo service as part of RealPlayer 4.0. It also partnered with Netscape to develop what would become the RTSP standard for streaming.
Real had been founded by Microsoft millionaire Rob Glaser. Microsoft owned ten percent of the company and licensed Real's streaming formats in NetShow, its product aimed at killing Netscape's streaming server. Microsoft's NetShow incorporated Real's streaming formats for compatibility with existing content, but hoped to eventually shift Internet streaming to its own new ActiveX Streaming Format (ASF). Despite its interests in Real, Microsoft's growing ambitions resulted in the company pitting itself against RealPlayer with its own Windows Media Player in 1998, a phoenix that rose from the ashes of 1996's Active Movie/DirectShow player, which themselves were rebranded versions of the company's ill fated QuickTime competitor originally named Video For Windows.
Just as QuickTime suddenly failed to work properly under Windows 98 and Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player suddenly stopped playing Real's streaming formats, as Glaser testified in the Microsoft Monopoly trial. Real executive David Richards also testified that Microsoft was pressuring AOL to drop support for Real and use Microsoft's own streaming software instead, citing an email on the subject from AOL's CEO to Glaser which warned, "They want to kill you guys so badly, it is ugly."
Microsoft hoped to own the future of streaming and digital playback both, so it took on Real and Apple at once, pushing the idea of streaming ASF (the Real killer) via MMS (Microsoft Media Server, the new name for NetShow and not to be confused with the mobile messaging protocol) and establishing ActiveX Authoring Format (AAF) as its QuickTime killer.
In 1998 AAF was rejected by the ISO in favor of QuickTime as the basis for the new MPEG-4 media container format. By 2003 MMS, which used its own proprietary system for streaming media, had been deprecated by Microsoft in favor of its own new RTSP server, Windows Media Server 9. After the ActiveX brand was sufficiently tainted by widespread security flaws, the A in ASF and AAF was changed to stand for "Advanced." Most recently, Microsoft was forced to drop its ASF and adopt the MPEG-4 container to support Smooth Streaming.
During its streaming battle with Microsoft, and without any other revenue streams to fall back on, Real turned itself into an adware vendor that attempted to leverage its existing value in RealPlayer to inundate users with marketing partners' messages and attempts to sell them subscription music. It also filed suit against Microsoft and won an antitrust settlement of $460 million in 2005.
