The years of unwarranted hype are over. Vendors of all types - hardware, software and services - are starting to solve the problems of delivering streaming media, especially large video files, across the Internet.

Prior to 2000, only software companies such as RealNetworks, Apple and, more recently, Microsoft have worked on the problems from a compression standpoint. With each successive release of their respective servers, codecs and media players, the three companies have increased video and audio quality while decreasing the size of the files. The recent release of RealAudio 8 can deliver near CD-quality sound over a 32K bit/sec connection, two-thirds the bandwidth used by RealAudio 7. Similar strides are being made with video.

Despite the decreasing bandwidth needs of the codecs and clients, the Internet is still a tricky place to deliver streaming media. Packet loss and unpredictable latency times greatly degrade the viewing and listening experience. With e-mail and Web browsing, there’s time to resend lost or out-of-order packets. But not with video - packets must arrive basically in order and at a constant rate to maintain quality.

Now hardware and service providers are getting into the act, building content-delivery networks that are designed to push content closer to end users and server architectures optimized for streaming media delivery. In 1999, companies such as Akamai Technologies and Digital Island built overlay networks for speeding Web page delivery. In 2000, these same companies added support for streaming media, with others, such as Exodus Communications, FastForward Networks

and Speedera Networks, getting into the act. These service providers offer different means to push content closer to the end user, reducing the number of hops in the network path and therefore reducing the chance of dropped packets.

With the combination of better codecs that use less bandwidth and improved delivery networks, streaming media is set to take off.

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Contact Multimedia Editor Jason Meserve

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