Live Streaming Coming to iPhone? Apple Submits New Spec to IETF
It looks like live streaming could be coming to a future generation of the iPhone and/or iPod devices. We've just come across this IETF submission containing Apple's spec for HTTP Live Streaming which describes a protocol for transmitting unbounded streams of multimedia over HTTP. According to the document, the protocol supports encryption of the media and the provision of alternate versions of the stream. The media data can also be transmitted after it's created, allowing it to be received in near real-time.
Could this mean live streaming is coming to our iPhones?
From our understanding of the documentation, this live streaming functionality will work using Playlist files located on the internet with a unique URI (uniform resource locator.) The Playlist itself will consist of a list of URIs each of which will point to a media file which is a segment of a single media stream.
The Playlists will be Extended M3U Playlist files, a standard playlist file format originally implemented by the Winamp player. These M3U files are plain text documents that contain the location of the media files that should be played. Originally, M3U files only supported audio playlists, but over the years they came to support video as well.
In the new specification, the M3U Playlist will extend the standard file format by defining additional tags called EXTM3U and EXTINF. The first of those two simply designates this playlist file as an extended M3U file and the second, EXTINF, is the record marker that describes the media file identified by the URI that follows it in the following format:
#EXTINF:<duration>,<title>
The document then goes on to describe how this new specification should operate in more detail - you can read it in its entirety here.
The big question is, what does this really mean? Is a future version of iTunes going to support streaming music and video from our PCs to our iPhones and iPods, or will we be streaming directly from an Apple server instead? Either way, having that option could free up our disk space considerably on our devices - perhaps so there's more room for apps?
Perhaps it's in preparation for the upcoming camcorder functionality rumored to be coming in the next gen iPhone. Once people start saving video files to their hard drives, those disks could fill up fast. Why not make some room by letting us stream our media instead?
Then again, maybe Apple just felt it was time to take advantage of cloud computing and stop limiting how much we carry with us based on iPhone/iPod disk size and the size of our PC hard drives. If so, that would be a fantastic feature. This author knows from personal experience that, in our household, we recently purchased all five seasons of a particular hour-long TV show and lost 30 some GBs on our PC's hard drive in the process. Being able to stream instead of download, in this case, would have been a huge benefit.
A final theory is that Apple is simply getting the jump on Microsoft, who proposed a similar adaptive video stream a year ago called Smooth Streaming but didn't submit it to IETF to make it an RFC.
We don't know how live streaming is going to be put into use right now - we can only theorize. All we know is that it's been developed so we're hoping we'll find out sooner or later. Take a gander at the spec yourself and share your theories with us in the comments section below.
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Consider me officially Stoked!
If I don't get the new iPhone
My life will be unsustainable!
Great post about Apple
Bummer - on Hacker News, a commenter notes this might have something to do with QuickTime instead. Boo!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592553
No, I'm pretty sure this is about the iPhone... http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2009AprJun/0237.html
Well Apple is going to show us some new feature (on top of the copy/paste), right?! :)
I'm sure it's going to be interesting summer. This is one tool I used to keep me updated: http://my-iphone-buzz.blogspot.com
Maybe for a Spotify like, subscription based streaming music, service based on itunes? It's imaginable Apple waited to do streaming until they could offer a viable service for mobile as well.
Very interesting. The last link on lists.w3.org does indicate that this might be iPhone-related.
Although, if this is a proposed IETF standard, then it may not just be an iTunes-to-iPhone streaming solution. It will probably be exposed as an API in the iPhone SDK and third-party servers will be allowed to stream.
Can someone explain how this is different than Qik which is available to jailbroken phones?
Hey I'm not sure this is such a big deal! I know for a fact that streaming does already exist. Maybe this is just a way for Apple to make it official. We stream information all the time and we've never had a problem with it.
Alex - Professional Cutie
www.mioamoredesign.com
behind iPod the iphone is the best invent!!!
There is a rumor that Apple is going to introduce a tablet device. I think it might be a competitor to Microsoft's Surface devices. The tablet will not be a piece of furniture itself, so can be placed in or on any convienent table anywhere. It will do device recognition, so streaming is a regular function. It should be able to recognize not only Apple devices, but cell phones and other wireless enabled items as well. The item doesn't have to be placed on the tablet, unlike the Surface table, so the tablet is obviously smaller. Handshaking functionality will be obviously easier with Apple software, than with Windows. I'm going WAY out on a limb here, but an Apple Tablet device could very well be a networked home's central hub in the very close future!
Thanks for the post.
I do not like at all iphone.:(
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