Multimedia streaming has major commercial potential as the global community of online video viewers is expanding rapidly following the proliferation of low-cost multimedia-enabled mobile devices. These devices enable increasing amounts of video-based content to be acquired, stored, and distributed across existing best effort networks that also carry other traffic types. Although a number of protocols are used for video transfer, a significant portion of the Internet streaming media is currently delivered over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Network congestion is one of the most important issues that affects networking traffic in general and video content delivery. Among the various solutions proposed, adaptive delivery of content according to available network bandwidth was very successful. In this context, the most recent standardisation efforts have focused on the introduction of the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) (ISO, 2012) standard. DASH offers support for client-based bitrate video streaming adaptation, but as it does not introduce any particular adaptation mechanism, it relies on third party solutions to complement it. This chapter provides an overview of the DASH standard and presents a short survey of currently proposed mechanisms for video adaptation related to DASH. It also introduces the DASH-aware Performance-Oriented Adaptation Agent (dPOAA), which improves user Quality of Experience (QoE) levels by dynamically selecting best performing sources for the delivery of video content. dPOAA, in its functionality, considers the characteristics of the network links connecting clients with video providers. dPOAA can be utilised as a DASH player plugin or in conjunction with the DASH-based performance-oriented Adaptive Video Distribution solution (DAV) (Rovcanin & Muntean, 2013), which considers the local network characteristics, quantity of requested content available locally, and device and user profiles.
