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.

This thesis presents a solution for peer assisted live video streaming in web browsers. The motivation behind the solution is that content providers, which need to allocate large amounts of server resources and bandwidth to support their services, could benefit from letting their viewers assist in distributing the video. Essential to this is the fact that live video streaming typically have relaxed time constraints, i.e. there is often a buffer of tens of seconds to allow for a smooth playback. The peer assistance is done with peer-to-peer connections that is natively supported in WebRTC-enabled web browsers. Peers cooperate by downloading different segments from the server and subsequently sharing this between themselves. For efficient utilization of the network, peers do also have a notion of the network topology and choose to cooperate with nearby peers. It is shown that server resources and bandwidth can be reduced by enabling peer assistance for suitable peers. / Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Donec odio elit, dictum in, hendrerit sit amet, egestas sed, leo. Praesent feugiat sapien aliquet odio. Integer vitae justo. Aliquam vestibulum fringilla lorem. Sed neque lectus, consectetuer at, consectetuer sed, eleifend ac, lectus. Nulla facilisi. Pellentesque eget lectus. Proin eu metus. Sed porttitor. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Suspendisse eu lectus. Ut mi mi, lacinia sit amet, placerat et, mollis vitae, dui. Sed ante tellus, tristique ut, iaculis eu, malesuada ac, dui. Mauris nibh leo, facilisis non, adipiscing quis, ultrices a, dui.