Streaming media is a relatively new technology that is beginning to have a major impact on the enterprise and on network providers. Because it is relatively new and not yet well understood, we will spend some time on it here. Although it is new, it is already generating impressive revenue numbers. Streaming media was a $400 million market in 2001, including products and services. According to Gerry Kaufhold of Cahners InStat, service providers in 2001 enjoyed revenues from streaming media in the neighborhood of $900 million. An additional $734 million was spent on servers and technologies for streaming media support. Even though these are relatively small numbers by network service provider standards, Cahners InStat predicts that this same market will grow to $7.7 billion in 2005.

Lawrence Orans, an analyst with Gartner Group, estimates that 80 percent of all Global 2000 companies will routinely use live and on-demand video to the desktop by 2006.

Streaming media has a number of key benefits. One of them is immediacy. The user begins to see the streamed content within seconds of booting up the appropriate media player. This is important: those readers who remember the early days of multimedia delivery via the Web will recall that the process took significantly longer because the player had to wait until the entire file downloaded from the source.

There are numerous applications for streaming media. Corporations with multiple locations can use streaming media to deliver a common message to every employee in the global...