This, perhaps, is the reason that Apple took a very different approach to delivering video to its iOS devices.
If you're looking to do live or adaptive streaming you have to use a format called 'M3U8'. Tis started life as an indexing file for MP3 video files, but was adapted by Apple as a means of splitting up and then reforming something called an MPEG-2 transport stream.
MPEG2 is the traditional codec used by broadcasters, and much of the television you will watch will be in this format. It isn't widely used in internet TV since the file sizes tend to be very big and the compression isn't very effective at lower bitrates (hence the popularity of MP4, or MPEG-4 for internet delivery).
Another objective that Apple seem to have set was to ensure that video delivery can be handled over port 80 using http. In other words, that it could travel using the same route as an old web page, hence making it more widely available in a world where 'reserved ports', such as 1935 for rtmp, are blocked by firewalls and the like.
The way it works is that an input stream is transcoded, or rather 'split up, into thousands of individual files with the extension '.ts'. These can carry the signal at multiple data rates, hence allowing for the data rate to be dynamically increased or decreased according to the viewer's available bandwidth. All of these files are then 'managed' by the index, or M3U8 file, which knows how to reassemble them and to adapt the stream.
It's actually very similar to the way the delivery of traditional browser based content works over the world wide web using http, but it is a very strange and rather crude approach to video delivery.
However, it seems to work pretty well. There are exceptions - sporting events, or events with a lot of movement, or when the adaptive rates are set too close together and the stream cannot 'adapt' quickly enough.
Another issue is that the setup of equipment to output M3U8 is far from easy - most of the tools available to do this are command based LINUX applications that require a fair degree of experience to use effectively. But gradually I'm sure we'll see these being automated and built into existing encoding solutions.
