TABLE OF CONTENTS Less than 10 years after its initial development, streaming joined the mainstream of communication media. The ubiquity of the Internet led many multimedia content owners to search for a way to deliver video content over an IP network. Video and audio are a more natural way to communicate than the text and images used for the first decade of the Internet. We only have to look at the overwhelming success of television. Combine live delivery over IP with video and audio and you have streaming.
The first multimedia applications used the Internet just for file transfer to the PC. Once the entire file had been downloaded, it could be played back locally, much like a CD-ROM. This is called download-and-play. True streaming is media content that is delivered to the viewer's media player in real-time. That means that it is transferred at the same rate as it is displayed. So a 10-minute clip will take 10 minutes to download over the network. There is no intermediate storage of the content between its origin and the player. The data is processed as it arrives at the player, and then discarded.
Three developments introduced this seed change in media delivery: the streaming server, advances in compression algorithms, and the improvements to the 'last mile.' Progressive Networks developed a way to...
