Audio streaming: The Ups and Downs of Audio Streaming

Multimedia streaming is the technology used to simultaneously receive multimedia clips as being delivered by the provider and display it on the user's end at the same time. Streaming media is transmitted on the Internet in the form of sound (audio) or video with the use of data packets. To access streaming media over the Internet, it is recommended to have a broadband connection to have a more effective reception.

Audio streaming is a type of multimedia streaming that uses sound or audio signals to convey the message as it arrives. In contrary to audio streaming, sound recording is an alternative way to transmit audio files, as it will not start unless the file is completely received. This is one of the advantages of audio streaming versus sound recording. Users do not have to wait for the entire file to arrive for audio streaming, though it may require a plug-in player such as Real Audio or Shockwave for it to play.

Many Web sites contain live or on-demand audio feeds. On demand streams are stored online on the server itself and is readily available once requested by the user while live streams are accessible only at a particular time such as a news report. But then again, there has been a lot of social and legal issues surrounding the use of audio streaming on Web sites. This does not pertain to audio streaming alone, but also video streaming. The reason for this is that the quality of media is being compromised. In addition, everyone can create and send audio and video streams, which results to legal battle of copyrights, patents and license agreements.