• Computer networks were designed to connect computers on different location so that they can share data and communicate.

• In old days, most of the data carried on network was textual data.

• Today, with the rise of multimedia and network technologies, multimedia has become a necessary feature on the internet.

• Animation, voice and video clips becomes more and more popular on the Internet.

• Multimedia networking products like internet telephony, internet TV, video conferencing have appeared on the market.

• Multimedia networking is to build the hardware and software infrastructure and application tools to support multimedia transport on networks so that users can communication in multimedia.

• Multimedia networking will greatly boost the use of computer as communication tool.

• Compared with traditional textual application, multimedia applications requires much higher bandwidth because it carries high volume audio, video, image data objects.

• Most multimedia applications requires real time traffic. Audio, video data must be played back continuously at the rate they are sampled. If data does not arrive in time, playing back process will stop.

• Multimedia data stream is usually bursty just increasing the bandwidth will not solve burstyness problem.

• For most multimedia applications, receiver has limited buffer space.

• In such cases, the buffer will overflows and some data packets will be lost.

• In real life, networks are shared by thousands and millions of users and have limited bandwidth, unpredictable delay and availability.

• Because of all these reasons design of real-time protocols for multimedia networking becomes necessary.

• Multimedia Networking means extremely dense data and heavy traffic and therefore high bandwidth is required.

• Multimedia applications are usually related to multicast, i.e. the same data stream, not multiple copies, is sent a group of receivers. e.g. in video conference, the video data need to be sent to all participants at same time. Live video can be send to thousands of recipients.

Streaming media:

• When media content is streamed to a client in real-time, the client can begin to play the stream without having to wait for complete stream to download.

• In fact, stream might not even have a predefined duration downloading, entire stream before playing it would be impossible.