Streaming formats are compressed much more than other sound or video formats and thus are easier to receive and to store. There is a wealth of streaming audio materials available on the Web in a great variety of languages. Most will let you know what technology they are using and will offer some assistance, but this varies greatly from site to site. The links to sites in the Resource List below are intended as examples, they do not represent by any means the full extent of offerings in any language. Only technologies for which they are a good number of sites offering audio or video in languages other than English are listed.
Some sites now offer files in more than one streaming standard.
The major European languages offer the richest variety of streaming audio and video. Swedish news is available, as is Norwegian , Icelandic , and Finnish . Live radio is being Web-cast from Romania , the Czech Republic , and Hungary . Non-European languages are represented as well, with news broadcasts from countries such as Israel , Taiwan , Ind ia , Korea , Indonesia , and Japan . The most obvious and direct benefit is the availability of authentic language materials in a multimedia format.