Streaming data through Unity - other than WWW?

I realize there are multiplayer solutions out there that do exactly this… but I’m wondering more about the protocols accessible without having to use a plugin or third party system.

It’s pretty easy to send data to an external server with WWW, but there’s the delay from having to access http. Are there faster supported protocols to send data, at a “streaming rate” (at least once per second)?

That still doesn’t seem like a terrible amount of data to send, but I’m assuming if you’re partially relying on response time, then using sockets may be your best bet. The default .NET socket networking is available to you, but of course going this route means a little more complicated server code if you’re building it out yourself.

A helpful video may be found here from Unite 2012, but doesn’t really give you any code to start out with, but there’s a plethora of information about that:

http://video.unity3d.com/video/6947115/unite-2012-unity-network

Depending on the data that you’re sending, you may also want to consider a RESTful solution as well. Now granted going REST would be yet another HTTP method, but it should be able to handle a load like that I would think depending on how many hits to the server you’re expecting.