In the early days of streaming media -- the mid-to-late 1990s -- watching videos and listening to music online wasn't always fun. It was a little like driving in stop-and-go traffic during a heavy rain. If you had a slow computer or a dial-up Internet connection, you could spend more time staring at the word "buffering" on a status bar than watching videos or listening to songs. On top of that, everything was choppy, pixilated and hard to see.
Streaming video and audio have come a long way since then. According to Bridge Ratings, 57 million people listen to Internet radio every week. In 2006, people watched more than a million streaming videos a day on YouTube [source: Reuters]. The same year, television network ABC started streaming its most popular TV shows over the Web. People who missed an episode of shows like "Lost" or "Grey's Anatomy" could catch up on the entire thing online -- legally and for free.

New hotness: Entire episodes of television shows streamed
directly to your computer.

The success of streaming media is pretty recent, but the idea behind it has been around as long as people have. When someone talks to you, information travels toward you in the form of a sound wave. Your ears and brain decode this information, allowing you to understand it. This is also what happens when you watch TV or listen to the radio. Information travels to an electronic device in the form of a cable signal, a satellite signal or radio waves. The device decodes and displays the signal.
In streaming video and audio, the traveling information is a stream of data from a server. The decoder is a stand-alone player or a plugin that works as part of a Web browser. The server, information stream and decoder work together to let people watch live or prerecorded broadcasts.
In this article, we'll explore what it takes to create this stream of ones and zeros as well as how it differs from the data in a typical download. We'll also take a look at how to make good streaming media files.
Finding and Playing Streaming Video and Audio
If you have a connection to the Internet and you want to find streaming video and audio files, you shouldn't have to look far. Sound and video have become a common part of sites all over the Web, and the process of using these files is pretty intuitive. You find something you want to watch or hear -- you click it, and it plays. Unless you're watching a live feed or a webcast, you can often pause, back up and move forward through the file, just like you could if you were watching a DVD or listening to a CD.

A video for "The Mesopotamians" by They Might Be Giants
plays in an embedded Flash player at stereogum.com.

But if you've never used streaming media, your computer may need a little help to decode and play the file. You'll need a plugin for your Web browser or a stand-alone player. Most of the time, the Web page you've visited points you in the right direction. It prompts you to download a specific player or shows you a list of choices.
These players decode and display data, and they usually retrieve information a little faster than they play it. This extra information stays in a buffer in case the stream falls behind. There are four primary players, and each one supports specific streaming file formats:

• QuickTime, from Apple, plays files that end in .mov.
• RealNetworks RealMedia plays .rm files.
• Microsoft Windows Media can play a few streaming file types: Windows Media Audio (.wma), Windows Media Video (.wmv) and Advanced Streaming Format (.asf).
• The Adobe Flash player plays .flv files. It can also play .swf animation files.

For the most part, these players can't decode one another's file formats. For this reason, some sites use lots of different file types. These sites will ask you to choose your preferred player or pick one for you automatically.
The QuickTime, RealMedia and Windows Media players can work as stand-alone players with their own menu bars and controls. They can also work as browser plugins, which are like miniature versions of the full-scale player. In plugin mode, these players can look like an integrated part of a Web page or pop-up window.
Flash video is a little different. It usually requires a Flash applet, which is a program designed to decode and play streaming Flash files. Programmers can write their own Flash applets and customize them to fit the needs of a specific Web page. Flash is becoming a more popular option for playing streaming video. It's what YouTube, Google Video and the New York Times all use to display videos on their sites. The video below, which demonstrates what would happen if you shot your TV, plays in a Flash applet.
Regardless of whether it's an applet or a fully functional player, the program playing the streaming file discards the data as you watch. A full copy of the file never exists on your computer, so you can't save it for later. This is different from progressive downloads, which download part of a file to your computer, then allow you to view the rest as the download finishes. Because it looks so much like streaming media, progressive downloading is also known as pseudo-streaming.
These players and applets do what many applications do -- they play files. We'll look at these files and how they travel to your computer in the next section.

Streaming Files
Streaming video and audio files are compact and efficient, but the best ones start out as very large, high-quality files often known as raw files. These are high-quality digital files or analog recordings that have been digitized, and they haven't been compressed or distorted in any way. Although you can watch a streaming file on an ordinary tv, editing the raw file requires lots of storage space and processing power.
It might seem strange that a file that ends up nimble and efficient started out large and unwieldy. The reason is that the compression process, required to make an ordinary file into a streaming file, lowers the file's quality. During compression, blurry, low-quality videos or hard-to-hear audio recordings will only get worse.