Low latency media ingestion system, devices and methods

A media distribution system and method wherein a media streaming network includes a media ingest network portion configured to provide low latency uploading of media fragments of a segmented live media stream using HTTP chunked transfer encoding. In one embodiment, one or more fragments of a segment are uploaded or otherwise ingested on a chunk-by-chunk basis before entire media data of the segment becomes available. An IP multicast distribution network portion coupled to the media ingest network portion is operative for distributing chunked media data to one or more IP multicast recipients using an IP multicast protocol. A client application is operative to download the media data in an HTTP CTE delivery session with a serving IP multicast recipient.