MIT built a better way to deliver high-quality video streams to multiple devices at once

Depending on your connection and the size of your household, video streaming can get downright post-apocalyptic -- bandwidth is the key resource, and everyone is fighting to get the most and avoid a nasty, pixelated picture. Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab created a system they call "Minerva" that minimizes stutters due to buffering, and pixelation due to downgraded stream, which it believes could have huge potential benefits for streaming services like Netflix and Hulu that increasingly serve multiple members of a household at once. Minerva works by taking into account the varying needs of different delivery devices streaming on a network -- so it doesn't treat a 4K Apple TV the same as an older smartphone with a display that can't even show full HD output, for instance.