What is streaming?
“Streaming” on the Internet is when you don’t have to wait until (e.g.) a sound file is completely downloaded before you can begin to listen to it. You can tell that it makes a lot of sense to use “streaming” with anything that happens in time, like audio, video and animation. Let’s look at an example: say you have a sound file of two minutes. Say it would take 5 minutes to download the entire file over your modem. Without “streaming” you’d have to wait 5 minutes until you can listen to the sound. With “streaming” your computer can start to play the sound after about 3 minutes. There’s still enough time to download the rest of the file without having to stop the music! While you can save 2 minutes in this example, most people don’t even want to wait for 3 minutes. For a start within seconds and for live radio or video on the Internet, the sound or video files have to be so small that their download time is not longer than their playtime. “Streaming” multimedia files always target a spe
