Check out Bravenet's FlashBlaster to create cool flash effects. There are many advantages to Streaming Media, mainly that it enables a user to start watching the media almost immediately, without having to wait for an entire download, and secondly that it protects content from unauthorized redistribution as the user is never allowed to save the media file to their hard drive. Once a source file has been created in the digitizing process, the file needs to be encoded.
Encoding is the compression of the audio or video into a format that can be streamed.
You can select many different options in this phase. An important one is the bit-rate of the streaming file. This will determine what speed of connection an end-user will need in order to view or hear your file. Remember all these steps can be outsourced. Streaming can be a relatively complicated process and there are companies that specialize in Digitizing, Encoding, and Publishing.