If a picture is a worth a thousand words, a moving picture is worth a million. But how do you cram all that information down a telephone? The trouble is that a couple of copper wires—the basic technology behind our home phone lines—cannot, ordinarily carry information quickly enough to bring things like radio and TV into our homes. If you've ever watched a fax machine chugging along, sending or receiving a printed document at a grindingly slow speed, you'll know just how slow telephone lines can be at carrying anything other than a person's voice (the only job they were ever designed to do).
In the days when most people had dial-up Internet connections (where you make a connection to your Internet Service Provider using a modem to enable what is essentially just a normal telephone call), slow speeds were a major limitation on what could be done online. If you wanted to listen to an MP3 music track (typically about 5 megabytes in size), you could spend half an hour waiting for the entire file to download onto your hard drive, then open it up and play it back. Video files (more likely to be 50 megabytes) would take several hours to download this way, so they were not generally available on the Net. In those days, it was impossible to listen to a music or movie file of any size without a long and tedious wait. The problem was essentially a matter of bandwidth: the speed of an Internet connection (how quickly it can download information) sets a limit to how quickly you can transfer a file.
In the mid-1990s, in the early days of the Web, Rob Glaser and his Real company (originally called Progressive Networks) pioneered streaming media as the solution to this problem. The basic idea is simple. Suppose you want to watch a large video file on your PC. You install a media player (a streaming-media-playing program) on your computer that plays the file while it downloads. So it downloads maybe the first 10 seconds of the file, stores or buffers it, then immediately starts to play it. As the media player starts playing the first part of the file, it's also downloading the next 10 seconds ready for when you come to that bit. The media player never actually stores more than a little bit of the entire file: once it's played part of the file, it deletes it to make way for the next bit. If the media player can download the file as fast as you're watching or listening to it, you'll see no interruptions; if there are delays in downloading for any reason, there will be occasional pauses while the player downloads and "buffers" the next bit of the file.
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