MediaGateway is Windows Media Server plug-in software. MediaGateway provides media files access management. It allows Windows Media server to validate users against an accounts storage. Another field where MediaGateway can be extremely useful is a gathering of the statistical information and billing of the media streaming. It is possible to implement the following billing schemes: pay-per-minute, pay-per-connection, pay-per-view, pay-per-traffic, One-on-One and custom billing schemes.

If client connects to media server and opens stream for playing, plug-in is notified about this event and parses request string to get title and ticket. After that plug-in sends client's ticket to the communication interface (CI). CI transmits this information to the accounts storage. Then MediaGateway receives information on client. If ticket is valid CI returns service type and number of paid time units. Plug-in receives this information and grants access to the requested media content. In other case, when user ticket is invalid, CI returns zero number of time units and plug-in denies access to media content. If client chooses pay-per-minute billing scheme, then plug-in periodically checks value of the time left, if it is zero – plug-in disconnects that user. In addition, client is disconnected if traffic limit is exceeded. When client disconnects from media stream, plug-in is notified on this and sends statistics to the CI. CI saves all received data in accounts storage. Statistical information consists of amount of bytes sent to client and time of the media streaming. While plug-in processing clients it saves statistical information warning and/or error messages in the log file. There are several log levels. Each log level define what kind of information to save in log files (all messages,

MediaGateway is a Unicode multithreaded application, designed specially for Windows Server. MediaGateway is able to handle almost unlimited numbers of clients simultaneously.