Streaming Media

What is streaming media?
Streaming media is the simultaneous transfer and display of sound and images on the World Wide Web.

What's so great about streaming media?
If you have ever downloaded a video or audio clip to your web browser, you know that it can take a while to receive a clip even it will only play for a few seconds. In contrast, a streamed clip begins to play back almost immediately. The user can watch and listen to sound and images while it is being sent to their browser, instead of waiting minutes or hours for it to download and then playing it.

Streaming Media Categories:

	Audio: utilizes the latest tools and methods for creating, serving and playing live or recorded web audio files
	Video: images are the focus here such as videos, or scalable animations, like Flash movies
	SYMM: SYMM is the acronym that means Synchronized Multimedia. If you've ever seen an old unsynchronized movie where the lips move a second before you hear the words you know why it's so important to synchronize

Who has used streaming media around the world?

A CEO wants to do a live broadcast to employees, partners, and key customers to explain the company's post-merger strategy. This would traditionally be done via satellite broadcast. By delivering the broadcast to PCs as well as TVs, the CEO can reach more people more conveniently

A customer calls technical support, asking how to connect the widget to the gadget. It's a 10-minute verbal explanation. There's a five-minute widget-to-gadget video clip on the web site, but it would take the customer 20 minutes to download

The sales and marketing teams need to be brought up to speed on the new product line, but these people are scattered across the globe, as are the product managers who need to brief them. The costs and logistics of bringing everyone together for a class are daunting

What about on campus?
Faculty can record a course session, create streaming media and deliver the clips through the Internet, which allows students to review the session or make up the session they missed. Using a streaming media player enables you to experience streamed files over the Internet or over a local area network in real time, without downloading the clip to your hard drive.

What types of streaming media are there?
There are three popular types of streaming media: RealMedia, QuickTime, and Windows Media. You need to download players to view or listen to the media.

Where can you go to get started and for support?
The Faculty Technology Development Lab is equipped with a video and audio workstation and multimedia application to get you started. Contact Shunfa Li at x5458 for further information.

Streaming to the rescue?
The appeal of streaming media is evident: Audio and video grab people's attention and can quickly present information that is easy to absorb. Audio and video are highly effective in selling, advertising, motivating, training and instructing. Using a streaming media player, a user can play audio and/or video within seconds after the first bits of the stream hit his or her computer. These players also support video-on-demand, in which the streaming server keeps a copy of the content that clients can request at any time