Understanding Media Streaming
Media streaming generally known as streaming media is a form of multimedia that can be continuously received displayed to an end-user while being delivered by the provider. It refers to the medium's delivery method not the medium itself. The term is generally used for a media that is distributed over a telecommunications network, as most of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming like T.V. or radio and some are inherently non-streaming like video cassettes, audio CDs and books.
There were attempts to stream media on the computers since the mid-20th century, but the real breakthrough came in the late 1970s. That is when various academic experiments fleshed out a concept of media streaming on computers. In the late 1980s, there were some consumer-grade computers that were powerful enough for displaying various media. However, there were some problems such as the absence of enough CPU power and bandwidth for supporting the required data rates. There were also some problems in creating a low-latency interrupt paths in the Operating System for preventing buffer underrun.
There were some developments in the late 1990s like; a greater network bandwidth, enhanced access to networks like the Internet. The standard protocols and formats, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML were being used and then Internet was commercialized.
All these developments in computer networking combined with modern home computers and operating systems made streaming media possible. This also ensured that it could be afforded by the ordinary consumers. Usually multimedia content is large in size due to which the cost for media storage and transmission remains very high. To counter this problem, media are generally compressed at the time of both storing and streaming. Media streaming can be live or on demand . Live media streaming is for one time only. For example, a live video streaming of a soccer match, on the other hand an on demand stream is stored on a server for a long period of time, this enables the users to receive a transmission whenever they want to.
There are mainly two methods of delivering a streaming audio and video content over the Internet. The first method involves the use of a standard Web server for delivering the audio and video data directly to a media player. The second method involves the use of a separate streaming media server specialized in audio/video streaming . Researches prove that a Web server streaming can be used as an effective interim solution, whereas a streaming server is comparatively more flexible and efficient. Media streaming or streaming media has really revolutionized the communication over the Internet and with passing time more and more developments are being made into this field of media streaming.
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