A variety of delivery rates and qualities are available, and naturally network congestion has a very large impact. At that rate, sound is only voice quality. Dropouts did happen, but they didn't distract too much from the content, which was a lecture on bio-diversity. Occasionally, we heard a strange echo effect, apparently caused by the network, and there was a hissing in the background. At this rate, the audio quality is acceptable for speech, and distortion caused by the compression is not great.
Higher rates are available for better quality, at lower compression.
Summary Live and pre-recorded audio streaming. Audio file compression. The transport protocols used are TCP and UDP . The compression algorithm used is proprietry and varies for different delivery rates and sound quality. Download RealPlayer clientside software from here.