Question

Is there any official standard for HTTP Streaming?

IIS Smooth Streaming refers to a technical overview document here:

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/626/smooth-streaming-technical-overview/

Apples has a proposal for HTTP Live Streaming here:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-01

but I couldn’t find any official standard for HTTP Streaming.

EDIT/Answer:

Thanks to Remy for his correct answer.

The more I looked into this the more I realized it is all pretty messed up. Several companies support "HTTP Streaming" but in completely unrelated ways. The core concept is the same, they all use a segmenter to break up the videos (either in advance or on-the-fly), server up a header with information on bitrate options and segments, and then serve individual segments upon request.

However, Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe each have a very different way of doing these parts which are totally incompatible. The only good thing is that Microsoft’s HTTP Smooth Streaming implementation supports both their own standard as well as Apple’s. However, Apple only supports this on QuickTime X on OSX and even then only in Safari or standalone, not in the QuickTime plugin used by Chrome or Firefox.

Answer 1

There is no single official standard for HTTP streaming yet. As you have noticed, there are several different techniques currently in use here and there by different vendors for different purposes.