US Patent 9338209 Use of metadata for aiding adaptive streaming clients

A method is provided in one example embodiment and includes receiving media from an input; gathering metadata from a plurality of media stream representations that are provided by the input; creating one or more metadata segments corresponding to the plurality of media stream representations in order to generate a metadata track; and making at least a portion of the metadata track available to a client device, where the portion of the metadata track is provided separate from a manifest file.