Technology to provide improved quality-of-experience-aware multimedia streaming is disclosed. Several types of communications that can be made between clients and servers are described. These communications enable improvements to current approaches that are used to achieve hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) adaptive streaming. These messages can be used in conjunction with computer circuitry configured to: determine a bandwidth available to the server for transmitting HTTP adaptive streaming content to a plurality of clients; receive HTTP requests from the plurality of clients for representations offered by the server in a manifest file for the HTTP adaptive streaming; and calculate an availability of each representation that is offered in the manifest file for the server. The availability can be calculated, at least in part, based on the determined bandwidth. The availability of each representation can be communicated from the server to the plurality of clients.