What is Streaming media?

·         Streaming media is video or audio content sent in compressed form over the Internet and played immediately, rather than being saved to the hard drive.

With streaming media, a user does not have to wait to download a file to play it. Because the media is sent in a continuous stream of data it can play as it arrives. Users can pause, rewind or fast-forward, just as they could with a downloaded file, unless the content is being streamed live.

RTMP/RTSP Streaming:  This method uses specialized webservers that only deliver the frames of a video the user is currently watching. No data is downloaded in advance and data a user has seen is immediately discarded.

·         RTMP can do live streaming, so people can watch your video while it is being recorded.

·         RTMP can do dynamic streaming, where the video quality (i.e. adaptive bitrate) automatically adjusts to changes in bandwidth.

·         Players can seek to later parts in a video, which is particularly useful for files > 10 minutes.

·         Players maintain a tiny buffer, instead of downloading a video during playback, saving bandwidth.

Disadvantages

·         RTMP uses different protocols and ports than HTTP, which makes it vulnerable to getting blocked by (corporate) firewalls. This issue can be prevented by streaming in RTMPT (tunneling over HTTP), which comes at a server performance cost. 

·         RTMP data is streamed to the player, which means the bandwidth of the connection must be larger than the data-rate of the video. If the connection drops for a couple of seconds, the stream will stutter. This issue can largely be prevented by using dynamic streams that include a low-quality file.