What are the benefits of streaming media?
Before the advent of streaming media technology, multimedia video and audio clips were downloaded as files (usually .AVI or .MPG) to your hard disk before you could view them. Then the file had to be opened using separate software applications like Apple’s Quicktime or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. This created two inconveniences for the user: 1) you had to wait for the media clip to download before you could open it. In theory a ten minute clip could be 10-MB (Megabytes) or more, which on slower connections (56 kbps or less) could take hours to download; 2) you had to have room to store the file on your hard disk. Streaming media technology solves both of these problems. You are able to view the media clip as-it-is-downloaded, thus there is no waiting for an entire file to download. After a few seconds of buffering the media clip begins playing. In addition, there is no hard disk space required: you view the clip directly from the remote machine it is stored on. With more and more
