Method and device for providing streaming content

A terminal, comprising:

• an access engine to receive metadata of media including one or more periods, to receive segments of the media based on information provided by the metadata, and to decode data of the media that is included in the segments;
• and
• a media engine to receive the data of the media from the access engine, and to output the media,
• wherein each of the periods comprises one or more groups, each of the groups comprises one or more representations of the media, and each of the representations is a structured collection of one or more media components within a period, and comprises one or more segments.

A method by which a terminal requests content through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) streaming to receive the content through the HTTP streaming, the method comprising:

• transmitting, to a server, a transmission request message including attributes of the terminal;
• receiving, from the server, a Media Presentation Description (MPD) suitable for the terminal, the MPD comprising descriptions of representations of the content;
• selecting an appropriate representation from among the representations in the MPD, based on the descriptions of the representations;
• and
• requesting the server to transmit content corresponding to the selected representation.

A method for providing content through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) streaming, the method comprising:

• receiving, from a terminal, a transmission request message including attributes of the terminal;
• transmitting, to the terminal, a first Media Presentation Description (MPD) suitable for the terminal based on the attributes, the first MPD comprising descriptions of representations specific to a predetermined category of the terminal, and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) of the specific representations;
• receiving, from the terminal, a request for content corresponding to a representation selected by the terminal, the content corresponding to the selected representation being requested via a URI of the selected representation in the first MPD;
• and
• transmitting the content corresponding to the selected representation to the terminal through the HTTP streaming.