Streaming media and bandwidth

High bandwidth use with streaming media

Video, audio, and other streaming media use a considerable amount of bandwidth--much more than the amount of bandwidth needed for Web and news traffic. For example, a media stream could require 10 KB each second, whereas a Web page that the user views for 10 seconds could require 10 KB.

The following illustration shows the flow of requests and media data that a streaming server sends back in a typical server-client streaming model for live streaming media presentations.

As the previous illustration shows, in the typical streaming server-client model, the streaming server sends a separate copy of the media stream to each client that requested the same unique stream.

Because streaming media uses a considerable amount of bandwidth, delivering multiple copies of the same media data between the streaming server and the clients can cause significant network and server congestion. The more clients that request the same media stream, the more bandwidth is used.

Effect of high bandwidth use on the quality of streaming media

Planning for efficient bandwidth use is a particularly important issue for streaming media. The reason is that bandwidth use has a direct correspondence to the quality of the media streams that are delivered to the clients. If your network is congested, your users are likely to experience problems such as jagged video, patchy audio, and unsynchronized video and audio as packets are dropped or arrive late. Conversely, the more bandwidth that is available, the better the quality of media streams. See Considerations for bandwidth for more information.