The Internet presents a variable and often unfriendly environment for delivering streaming media. Throughput and latency vary due to high loads or poor physical conditions on devices such as dial-up modems.

One of the fastest growing field within multimedia today are technologies dealing with so called streams. Although there are many definitions of what stream is, the one given below is the author's favorite:

A stream is data of a distinct type that is sent from server to client at the rate defined by the server, even if more bandwidth is available.

Therefore the need to have not only the data "channel" between the server and the client, but also a channel for the data flow control is obvious.

Multimedia streams on the Internet are today easily found. Technologies such as low bandwidth teleconferencing introduced in many products such as Vocaltech's Internet Phone, Microsoft's NetMeeting, Netscape's Cool Talk or White Pine's CUSeeMe, use special 2-way implementations of what basically is data streaming.

However, this tutorial deals primarily with Web multimedia, meaning that only technologies which are invoked through the WWW, serve the same purpose as WWW itself or enhance standard static WWW will be discussed.