Blog 3 – Life Is But A Stream… A HTTP Stream.

Today’s blog will explore HTTP streaming and why it is vastly used to stream media online across various platforms as well some great online projects that are a great example of the flexibility of this protocol. 

Lets get started with some basic background information to wet the appetite… HTTP in the most simple form stands for ‘HyperText Transfer Protocol’ – Very exciting stuff right? It is the protocol used by the World Wide Web which ultimately defines how we send and receive data messages/commands and the response we get back (Webopedia.com, 2013). HTTP is layered onto of a TCP ‘Transmission Control Protocol’ to give a request-response transport protocol… In normal talk, we make a request and get a single response back to which the connection is then terminated, probably by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself for all we know! 

Now HTTP Streaming which is also known as HLS which was originally developed by Apple in 2009 (En.wikipedia.org, 2019). This type of protocol has the same request-response system but this time we make a single request but can receive a number of responses meaning the connection stays established using server-sent event text in HTML5 (Stack Overflow, 2011). It also means that video downloaded using this protocol can be opened in a text file document. Thats right a use for the Notepad application finally!! 

It must be noted that we aren’t really talking about streaming here, yes we are ‘streaming’ but the client receive this as a progressive download meaning the information is stored on their computer as a HTML file which is giving the video in segments and in most cases it is impossible for the user to put all the segments together to recreate the video for continued use without a internet connection to the server (Brightcove, 2009).

References 

Brightcove. (2009). Progressive Download versus Streaming. [online] Available at: https://www.brightcove.com/en/blog/2009/03/progressive-download-versus-streaming [Accessed 29 Oct. 2019].

En.wikipedia.org. (2019). HTTP Live Streaming. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming [Accessed 29 Oct. 2019].

Stack Overflow. (2011). WebSockets protocol vs HTTP. [online] Available at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14703627/websockets-protocol-vs-http [Accessed 29 Oct. 2019].

Webopedia.com. (2013). What is HTTP – HyperText Transfer Protocol? Webopedia Definition. [online] Available at: https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HTTP.html [Accessed 29 Oct. 2019].