Intro

Growth of the Internet caused an increasing demand for multimedia information and interaction on the Web. But the size of average audio or video files can be count in mega or even gigabytes whereas a one-page document is only about 20 to 30 kilobytes. Trying to send such a big media files over the internet or even high-bandwidth connections such as cable or DSL would take minutes or hours! Very few people will sit and wait an hour to see a couple of minutes of video.

The solution to this problem – data streaming – was acknowledged from early 1980s. But at the time computers weren’t yet powerful enough to handle the display of various media and the computer networks were still limited. Therefore media had to be delivered over non- streaming channels, such as a CD-ROMs. Just the late 1990s brought greater network bandwidth, increased access to networks, use of standard protocols and formats, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML that made streaming possible, practical and efficient.

Follansbee defines streaming as the ‘continuous transfer of data from one computer to another in real time’ using data packets (Follansbee, 2006). The critical difference between streaming and downloading is that with downloading the data can’t be played until the entire download is complete. Streaming allows a data to be sent as a continuous stream and is played as it arrives.

We can differ two ways in which media can be stream:

• on demand when streams are stored on a server for a long period of time, and are available to be transmitted, or
• live when data are only available at one particular time, as in broadcasting live internet radio that are sometimes broadcast simultaneously over the air or internet.