What is Unicast

In this article we analyze scalable video transmission, from the perspective of video coding standards and the necessary developments in protocols that support media distribution in current and future network architectures. In the next section we start by describing the first contributions to this topic and following developments in related video coding standards. We then describe the structure of a scalable video bitstream, taking the novel H.264/SVC standard as reference, and we further proceed with an analysis of the protocols that can be used for the description, signaling, and transport of scalable video. We describe different network scenarios and examples where scalable video offers significant advantages, before moving on to some remarks on future trends in this area, discussing those mechanisms that must be associated with SVC techniques to achieve an efficient and robust transmission system, and concluding the article.