—The amount of audiovisual data available on the Internet and thus of multimedia communication over today’s networks is increasing at a rapid pace. Despite the availability of specific media transport protocols like RTP, most content providers make use of the well-established and reliable TCP protocol to deliver audiovisual content over the Internet. The reason is that TCP-based data delivery in general is much less complicated for the clients to be served and over today’s networks traversed (including proxies and firewalls), than making use of UDP-based RTP connections. However, in case of network bandwidth fluctuations and packet losses, TCP-based media delivery may lead to annoying jerky playback at the client side, due to retransmissions and late arrival of media data. This papers deals with TCP-based perceptual QoS improvement mechanisms for increasing the media experience for the consumer under unstable network conditions. Our approach is based on media content adaptatio...