Difference between revisions of "Streaming media"

Latest revision as of 06:15, 22 April 2016

Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider.

Description

The verb "to stream" refers to the process of delivering media in this manner; the term refers to the delivery method of the medium, rather than the medium itself, and is an alternative to downloading.

A client media player can begin to play the data (such as a movie) before the entire file has been transmitted. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies specifically to telecommunications networks, as most of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g., radio, television) or inherently nonstreaming (e.g., books, video cassettes, audio CDs).

For example, in the 1930s, elevator music was among the earliest popularly available streaming media; nowadays Internet television is a common form of streamed media. The term "streaming media" can apply to media other than video and audio such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are all considered "streaming text". The term "streaming" was first used in the early 1990s as a better description for video on demand on IP networks; at the time such video was usually referred to as "store and forward video",[1] which was misleading nomenclature.

Live streaming

Live streaming, which refers to content delivered live over the Internet, requires a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content.

See also

• Multimedia
• Streaming media server

External links

• Streaming media @ Wikipedia