With increasing audio/video service consumption through unmanaged IP networks, HTTP adaptive streaming techniques have emerged to handle bandwidth limitations and variations. But while it is becoming common to serve multiple clients in one home network, these solutions do not adequately address fine tuned quality arbitration between the multiple streams. While clients compete for bandwidth, the video suffers unstable conditions and/or inappropriate bit-rate levels.

Adaptive streaming with HTTP has become popular in recent years, enabling continuous delivery of live and VOD content without the need for guaranteed bandwidth. It remains however challenging to maintain a smooth quality of experience under tough network conditions especially for bandwidth eater content like High Definition or 3D. In this paper we show that it is possible to both greatly improve the average quality and attenuate the quality variations for a better user experience by leveraging multipath communication requiring no extra bandwidth. We exploit concurrently multiple paths using a CDN compliant distributed streaming infrastructure and standard HTTP range requests and present the results of several network configurations.