For the transportation of integrated video and audio, VivoActive uses HTTP protocol. This has, of course, advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantage is inevitable loss in speed and quality, compared to transmission over UDP, and impossibility of live transmissions.
Slowdowns occur when TCP packets are lost and retransmitted. The main advantage is that the system requires no custom server, which usually costs lots of money and requires configuration and maintenance. The webmaster uses simple EMBED and OBJECT HTML tags to integrate vivo multimedia on a Web page.

Players (viewers) are free. The tool that costs is VivoActive Producer, which converts Audio Video Interleave (AVI) and QuickTime Movie (MOV) files to Vivo, and costs little less than 1000 USD. The content provider should a priori decide the compression (bitrate) of the media in the range of 14.4 kbps to 115.2 kbps. While older version supported only 176x144 pixel resolutions, newest version supports four times enhanced resolution.

On the painful road towards global standardization, it is important to stress that H.263 is used for video, and G.723 for audio compression, making this kind of Web video widely accessible to players which support these standards. H.263 is based on Discrete Cosine Transform algorithms, which are more efficient than fractal and wavelet algorithms (for example, a 20 Mb big screen AVI file containing 30 seconds of video material, can be compressed to 100 Kb Vivo file of reasonable screen size, and up to 10 frames per second).

Vivo is used on many Web sites, but owes its popularity mostly to CNN, CNET, BBC, HP, Intel and formerly ABC which introduced it to broader audience.

Vivo player is available as plug-in for Netscape Navigator and ActiveX component for MSIE.