Patent ID: 7657651

Claim:
A system for streaming media information via a network to heterogeneous clients, comprising: a broadcaster that receives media information, determines an encoding strategy for the media information, encodes a plurality of descriptions of the media information according to the encoding strategy, and transmits the descriptions along with control information; and a streaming server and receiver modeler that transmits one of the descriptions along with control information to at least one of the heterogeneous clients, and another of the descriptions along with control information to at least another of the heterogeneous clients, respectively, receives feedback from each of the heterogeneous clients, and thins at least one of the plurality of descriptions in accordance with the received feedback aggregated from each of the heterogeneous clients, wherein only one version of the plurality of descriptions is subsequently transmitted to the heterogeneous clients, wherein each of the heterogeneous clients receives one description for each data unit, but successive descriptions can come from different compressed bitstreams.