Enriching Viewer Options in P2P Media Streaming Applications

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) media streaming applications are increasingly popular on the Internet and offer a wide variety of media content, attracting potentially millions of viewers simultaneously. However, much content is duplicated, synchronously and asynchronously: popular Hollywood movies are often offered by many different on-demand streaming service providers; live streaming service providers distribute the same media content, for instance television series, in different channels over a delay of some hours or days. Viewers are more concerned about the media content and the quality of the streaming service, and less about who is actually offering it. In this article we aim at enriching the viewers' options instead of focusing on particular streaming applications: 1) we present a general content service facilitating the viewers to share their choices of what, when and where they will watch; 2) we extend streaming clients to accommodate various behaviors of the viewers besides their traditional operations. As such, the viewers will get a better experience, and streaming service providers and Internet service providers both have an opportunity to cut down their resource consumption.