Using these two methods, we can stream good quality audio to just about any machine connected to the internet. In the early days of the WWW, this was virtually impossible. Advances on both fronts have changed the possibilities considerably today. They have also spent a great deal of effort developing and refining compression algorithms, the core of any streaming technology, to allow us to display better quality media at lower bandwidths. So, while the general problem of delivering multimedia to the home desktop is not yet solved, it is much better than it was, and should continue to improve as we all get to take advantage of the large investments being made in communications infrastructure around the world.
Intranets enjoy economies of scale.
The same goes for the connections between individual machines on the intranet, which typically communicate at speeds much higher than the phone line connections available to most home users. The result is that it is possible, with a bit of management, to move high-quality multimedia around inside an institutional intranet like our university. This page created and maintained by Chuck Allen .