Yes you're right, TV works the way it works because at the time it was the best they could do. A stream per file was simply not feasible.

I had another solution in mind which would basically be a service script to which the clients' players would connect returning a binary video stream. This service would then hack a local video file into pieces so that the video file starts at time X, and would then fix and return the file so that the clients' player can interpret the stream. I know that there are ways of doing this with php and I also know that anything beyond re-sizing an image with PHP is just overkill and takes huge amounts of time. Still I guess that this would come closest to what I wanted to do.

What do you think of that?

Thanks

Laurent