Patent ID: 7284187

Claim:
A method of streaming multimedia objects encapsulated into a multimedia document, the method comprising: receiving author specification of multimedia content and choreography information that indicates a temporal order for rendering the multimedia content, the multimedia content being defined by at least first, second, and third multimedia objects and the choreography information including a relative sequence specified by the author for rendering the first, second, and third multimedia objects, the relative sequence indicating that the first and second multimedia objects be rendered progressively together over a common time period and the third multimedia object be rendered subsequent to the rendering of the first and second multimedia objects; interleaving data slices of the first and second multimedia objects with each other and adding the interleaved data slices to a multimedia document; adding data slices of the third multimedia object to the multimedia document without interleaving the data slices of the third multimedia object with data slices of other objects in the multimedia document; and streaming the multimedia document to a recipient for rendering according to the choreography information, such that the data slices of the first and second multimedia objects are progressively rendered together during the common time period before all data slices of the first and second multimedia objects are received and the data slices of the third multimedia object are progressively rendered after the rendering of the first and second multimedia objects and only after a sufficient amount of the data slices of the third multimedia object are received to enable rendering of the third multimedia object.