Server Admin 10.4 Help
Ways to Receive Streamed Media
When you watch and listen to cable or over-the-air media transmissions on television or radio, the cable or electromagnetic wavelengths used are dedicated to that transmission. Those transmissions are mostly uncompressed and consume large amounts of transmission bandwidth. It's not a problem, because they don't have to compete with other transmissions within the frequency over which they're broadcast.
When you send that same media over the Internet, the bandwidth used is no longer dedicated to only that transmission stream. The media now has to share extremely limited bandwidth with thousands, potentially millions, of other transmissions traveling back and forth over the Internet. Therefore, before multimedia is sent over the Internet, it is encoded and compressed for transmission. The resulting files are saved in a specific location, and streaming server software such as QuickTime Streaming Server sends the media over the Internet to client computers.
Macintosh and Windows users can view streamed media with QuickTime Player (available free on the Apple website) or any other application that supports QuickTime or standard MPEG-4 files. You can also set up streams that users can view from within a web browser (they must have the QuickTime plug-in installed). When a user starts to play streamed media on a webpage, the QuickTime plug-in sends a request to the streaming server, and the server responds by sending the multimedia content to the client computer. You specify on the webpage what content to send to the client—a QuickTime movie in a specified directory, a live broadcast, or a playlist on the streaming server. 3GP streams can be viewed on streaming-enabled cell phones.
For more information, see these topics: