The bitrate for any practical video streaming system will vary considerably as a function of the difficulty of encoding the sequence in question. This variation is even more apparent when comparing different video clips of different genres for example where sports clips might require a higher average bitrate and fluctuate more due to the high activity of typical scenes, whereas a news report clip might require a much lower bitrate and be relatively static. As such, to deliver video streams at a constant quality to users sharing a contended network, a constant bandwidth method is not efficient to use across all the streams. The bandwidth allocated to each stream must be allowed to dynamically vary in time in accordance with the precise demands of the video being streamed at that time and also be within any network bandwidth constraints. The present invention defines such a method.