Introduction

Overview

If you’ve ever clicked a link on a Web site that took you to a news story or movie trailer, or listened to a song snippet before ordering a CD from an online music store, then you’ve probably experienced streaming media. Streaming media is a new and continuously evolving medium that gets more interesting every day.

This book is a roadmap for setting up a streaming media system using Microsoft Windows Media 9 Series. What is Windows Media 9 Series? It’s a suite of tools that enables you to create, encode, distribute, and play high-quality audio and video content over the Internet.

Streaming media isn’t only for national retail chains with a large online presence. Nor is it only for Fortune 500 companies with global interests and extensive information technology (IT) departments. Rather, streaming media is for anyone who has an interest in making their music or movies available to others on the World Wide Web. So if you are thinking about using Windows Media 9 Series to create a streaming media system for a garage band or starting an Internet-only radio station, read on.

In this book, we’ll address three distinct scenarios in three different market segments, and we’ll explain from beginning to end how to implement these scenarios in your own environment. These scenarios were chosen based on our research into the most common streaming media implementations. While it would not be possible in a book of this size to cover all the nuances of each scenario, we do offer best practices where possible and offer suggestions for alternatives when it makes sense to do so.

Having explained what this book is, let’s take a moment to describe what the book is not intended to be. This book is neither a troubleshooting guide nor an in-depth examination of Windows Media tools and features. It does not attempt to compare Windows Media 9 Series to other products on the market today. While this book does contain a chapter on the basics of streaming media, it does not purport to educate you on the history or science of the medium.