Have you ever wished that you could see that clip that everyone is talking about after the big game? Or do you wish there was a way to send your relatives the cute home videos of your kids that they would love? What about personal video or audio for your website? Well now it is very, and I mean VERY, possible.

The ability to transfer and receive and then watch and/or listen to audio video on the internet is made possible by something called streaming media. Streaming media is a system of information transfer that allows a very large audio or video file to be consumed as it is delivered. There are several advantages to this. One is that you don't have to sit around and wait for the whole large file to be down loaded to the hard drive and then to be uploaded on to the player in order to finally play it. Rather it can be played while it is uploading, a much more efficient process.

The size of multimedia, as was already mentioned is inherently large in terms of amount of bytes. When dealing with such large files, the costs of storage and transfer are still significant even in this age of computers. This immense size led to systems that allowed this data to be organized more efficiently into smaller packets, in other words compressed. It also dramatically shortened the time of transfer of these compressed packets. Streaming takes advantage of this compression as it allows the data to arrive as fast or faster than real time. This prevents the hang-ups, and delays that we all were so used to 5-10 years ago (and still are if you are still stubborn enough to be using a dial-up connection.

So simply put streaming media is the description of the process of the transfer, reception, unpacking, and playing or broadcasting of multimedia files whether they be audio or visual or both. Now media streams can be "on demand" or "live." On demand streams are stored on a server and transferred as people choose to consume them. An example of this would be the video clips that you can find all over the web whether they be news clips, sports clips, or home video clips. Live streams are as they happen just like you would guess. Examples of live streams on the internet would be the now popular web cams that many people have set up in their homes.