A method for detecting a video request, the method comprising: monitoring communications on a network to detect sessions between a client device and a server for streaming video content to the client device by intercepting requests originating from the client device, wherein the requests are intercepted from the network; determining if a request originating from the client device is associated with establishing a session for streaming a video from the server based on information associated with the request; determining to transcode the video based on properties of the client device; and characterized in replacing, in response to the video being identified for transcoding, the detected video session for streaming the video between the client device and the server with a new session through an optimizer, wherein the replacing of the detected video session comprises transmitting a redirect request to the client device, the redirect request comprising a uniform resource locator identifying a location of the video at the server, transcoding parameters determined for the video based on the properties of the client device and configured to automatically redirect the client to the optimizer for establishing the new session; and wherein, in response to receiving the redirected request from the client device, the optimizer: retrieves video data corresponding to the video from the server based on the uniform resource locator; transcodes the video data received from the server based on the transcoding parameters for the video based on the properties of the client device; and establishes the new session with the client device for streaming the transcoded video data to the client device over the new session while receiving the video data from the server. monitoring communications on a network to detect sessions between a client device and a server for streaming video content to the client device by intercepting requests originating from the client device, wherein the requests are intercepted from the network; determining if a request originating from the client device is associated with establishing a session for streaming a video from the server based on information associated with the request; determining to transcode the video based on properties of the client device; and characterized in replacing, in response to the video being identified for transcoding, the detected video session for streaming the video between the client device and the server with a new session through an optimizer, wherein the replacing of the detected video session comprises transmitting a redirect request to the client device, the redirect request comprising a uniform resource locator identifying a location of the video at the server, transcoding parameters determined for the video based on the properties of the client device and configured to automatically redirect the client to the optimizer for establishing the new session; and wherein, in response to receiving the redirected request from the client device, the optimizer: retrieves video data corresponding to the video from the server based on the uniform resource locator; transcodes the video data received from the server based on the transcoding parameters for the video based on the properties of the client device; and establishes the new session with the client device for streaming the transcoded video data to the client device over the new session while receiving the video data from the server. retrieves video data corresponding to the video from the server based on the uniform resource locator; transcodes the video data received from the server based on the transcoding parameters for the video based on the properties of the client device; and establishes the new session with the client device for streaming the transcoded video data to the client device over the new session while receiving the video data from the server.