Media Streaming

Some while back I started playing around with accessing UK streamed TV from Canada. This was early days and the BBC were developing their iPlayer platform and making it available on the Internet. The original iPlayer was based on work derived from a MacroMedia Adobe/Flash platform.

Since that time, 2004, things have moved on considerably. The BBC iPlayer has changed from the original MacroMedia scheme to a much more sophisticated platform and a lot of the propreity software has been re-written by the BBC engineers and software developers. Even in 2009 development on the original Adobe software was being worked on by Phil Lewis, a freelance (I believe) programmer for the BBC. Phil produced a Perl script that was one of the first PVR software packages. This Perl Script was called Get_iPlayer and it could be used to schedule downloads from the BBC iPlayer program listings.

Now in 2023 we have multiple streamig platforms in addition to the BBC iPlayer, including Netfix, Amazon and host of other services

As far as I am aware the core of this technology was and still is based on the early work by Stepanchuk and Chu on RMTP, the Real Time Messaging Protocol. In a similar manner to other protocols, HTTP for one, it is still being used today.

Stepanchuk and Chu and RMTP

Andrej Stepanchuk and Howard Chu were the programmers that released the original RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) programs.