HotStreaming: Enabling Scalable and Quality IPTV Services

HotStreaming is an overlay peer-to-peer based IPTV system. It consists of three major technical components: partnership formation, video segment request scheduling, and multiple description code. This system is, to our best knowledge, one of the pioneering, if not the first, IPTV systems that integrate innovations in overlay networking and video coding for optimal user experience. In this paper, we focus our discussions on the partnership formation and multiple description code components, the core innovations on the networking and video coding sides. The preliminary experimental results indicate that HotStreaming is promising and significantly enhances the state of the art. In particular, the proposed partnership formation scheme is able to achieve one-order-of-magnitude better stability.