How this Book is Organized

The book begins with a review of streaming media basics. These basics hold true regardless of the technology being used to stream digital media. In the first chapter of part I, we’ll cover the differences between streaming content and downloading it, discuss the four phases of streaming, learn best practices for creating compelling audio and video content, understand how to calculate the optimal bit rate for your content, and explain the importance of codecs.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 take those concepts and show how they apply to the Windows Media 9 Series platform. We’ll introduce the three main components of the Windows Media platform, which enable you to compress, distribute, and play back digital media content. We’ll also dig deeper into some of the features of each of these components in order to illustrate the breadth of tools available for ensuring that your streaming media implementation is just what you need it to be.

Parts II, III, and IV introduce real-life scenarios that can be put into practice in order to achieve different goals. In these scenarios, we walk you through the implementation process from envisioning the streaming media solution to planning for it, deploying it, and testing it. Along the way we discuss hardware and software needs, network considerations, fine-tuning, and scaling. We’ll also discuss tools such as vision statements, business plans, topology maps, and so on that you might use to mark completion of each phase of the implementation.