What is streaming?
Streaming is a special means of hosting multimedia content (music or video clips) on your server. It allows your content to be played by your site visitors just as if they tuned to radio or television station. Streaming has many advantages to simply putting your multimedia files on your website for download:
- Users don't need to download any files to their local disks, because all content is served directly from your server.
- Streaming is specifically designed to deliver multimedia content in real time over the Internet. When user is downloading a file, there may be some delays over the net. This way, viewing of the file would be delayed, leaving an unpleasant feel. But with streaming, the software on the server would detect a delay, simply omit the portion that was delayed and proceed to further content. Still the omission would be visible to the user, but the content would be served in real time with no delays. It is especially important with video, where amount of content to be downloaded is huge and users cannot be presented with constant delays.
- Many users can be served the same content at once. For example, if you are running an Internet radio network, everyone listens to the same content at the same time (just as with the normal radio). This allows you to schedule programs on fixed hours, and so on. If they were to download music files form your server, everyone would listed to different pieces of your program at different times. Note, however, that this would be much better way to put archived versions of your programs, because users could choose when and what to listen from your archive.
Streaming is a must when you want to server multimedia content in real-time (such as with an Internet radio), or put huge video clips on your website.
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