Patent ID: 7783773

Claim:
A computer-implemented method with at least one client computing device with a media player and at least one remote computing device, comprising: indexing media content by a search service; evaluating text input by a user to return a URL listing of remote computing devices including at least one remote computing device hosting the indexed media content relating to the text input; providing, by the at least one client computing device with a media player, media content streaming services to the user to stream the indexed media content from the at least one remote computing device, the providing being independent of whether the at least one remote computing device implements media content streaming services, the at least one client computing device with a media player providing the media content streaming services by: establishing, multiple transport protocol connections to the at least one remote computing device; tasking each connection of at least a subset of the multiple transport protocol connections to read a particular data segment of the indexed media content, the data segment identifying a respective offset into the indexed media content and a number of bytes to read; managing connection tasks to regulate data input into a streaming media buffer for storing received data segments of the indexed media content; removing data from the streaming media buffer for real-time playback to the user; determining the number of bytes for each connection based on periodic determinations of the transmit rate on the connection; and requesting overhead on each connection, byte-size of the media content, and bit-rate at which the indexed media content was encoded.