Streaming Media -- The Future Of The Internet.
Author: Boyd Troublerr

Have you ever wished that you could see that clip that everyone
is talking about after the big game? Or do you wish there was a
way to send your relatives the cute home videos of your kids
that they would love? What about personal video or audio for
your website? Well now it is very, and I mean VERY, possible.

The ability to transfer and receive and then watch and/or
listen to audio video on the internet is made possible by
something called streaming media. Streaming media is a system
of information transfer that allows a very large audio or video
file to be consumed as it is delivered. There are several
advantages to this. One is that you don't have to sit around
and wait for the whole large file to be down loaded to the hard
drive and then to be uploaded on to the player in order to
finally play it. Rather it can be played while it is uploading,
a much more efficient process.

The size of multimedia, as was already mentioned is inherently
large in terms of amount of bytes. When dealing with such large
files, the costs of storage and transfer are still significant
even in this age of computers. This immense size led to systems
that allowed this data to be organized more efficiently into
smaller packets, in other words compressed. It also
dramatically shortened the time of transfer of these compressed
packets. Streaming takes advantage of this compression as it
allows the data to arrive as fast or faster than real time.
This prevents the hang-ups, and delays that we all were so used
to 5-10 years ago (and still are if you are still stubborn
enough to be using a dial-up connection.

So simply put streaming media is the description of the process
of the transfer, reception, unpacking, and playing or
broadcasting of multimedia files whether they be audio or
visual or both. Now media streams can be "on demand" or "live."
On demand streams are stored on a server and transferred as
people choose to consume them. An example of this would be the
video clips that you can find all over the web whether they be
news clips, sports clips, or home video clips. Live streams are
as they happen just like you would guess. Examples of live
streams on the internet would be the now popular web cams that
many people have set up in their homes.


About The Author: Boyd Troublerr has been in the broadcasting
industry for 3 decades and is excited about the changes that
are on the horizon with the advent of streaming media on the
internet. To find out more click on:
http://www.allstreamingmedia.info .