1.3 Overview

The Windows Media HTTP Streaming Protocol is used for transferring real-time multimedia data (that is, audio and video). It is a streaming protocol, which means that the protocol attempts to facilitate scenarios where the multimedia data is being transferred and rendered simultaneously (that is, video is being displayed and audio played).

The protocol depends on HTTP for the transfer of all protocol messages, including the transfer of the multimedia data. In this specification, the entity that initiates the HTTP connection is referred to as the client, and the entity that responds to the HTTP connection is referred to as the server. The multimedia data flows from the server to the client.

The server can also act as a proxy server. The proxy server plays roles as both client and server; the interaction previously described is the same.

The client can send feedback to the server in the form of HTTP-based request messages. Based on the feedback, the server can, for example, replace the currently transmitted video stream with a lower bit-rate version of the same video stream.

Unlike HTTP, which is a stateless protocol, this protocol does maintain state, referred to as session state.

It is the session state that allows a server to relate an HTTP request containing feedback information to an HTTP request used for the transfer of the multimedia data.

In its most common mode of operation, feedback from the client is sent to the server by using HTTP requests on TCP connections that are separate from the TCP connection that is used by the server to transfer the multimedia data to the client. This transfer is referred to as the normal, or non-pipelined mode of operation.

In another mode of operation, feedback from the client can be sent to the server by using HTTP requests on the same TCP connection that the server uses for transferring multimedia data to the client. This transfer is referred to as the pipelined mode of operation.