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Feeding the Streaming Media Frenzy December 4, 2000 By Oliver Rist Call it the "glitz overhead": the high-resolution images, Macromedia Flash animation and point-of-sale security that draw customers to B2C sites. You might think the sizzle stops at the consumer's screen, but B2B developers are finding just as many uses for streaming media, and the overhead keeps getting steeper. Streaming traffic means more than just full-motion video. Real-time and near-real-time data feeds can benefit from streaming traffic, as can advanced Web communications such as VoIP (voice over IP) and the ever-surviving videoconference.
Web application providers have additional headaches: advanced DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and XHTML (Extensible HTML) pages, JavaScript, ActiveX controls, Java applets, and an ever-increasing number of Web-oriented coding languages and application snippets. Many of these can run nearly independently on the server or the client side, but interactive-business-application serving is bringing with it a new need for constant server-to-client throughput performance. Keeping a customer interested in a product for a few minutes is one thing; making sure your customer is satisfied with daily application performance is another. If you plan to feed any form of streaming media to your customers, you'll need to map their locations to optimal NAPs (network access points) and PoPs (points of presence), taking into account both software and hardware. Business data must be protected, and security requires not only money but throughput. And the headaches don't stop at server and network performance, local redundancy or service-side disaster recovery, either. You have to worry about multiple serving sites--especially if you're international. All these complexities present CTOs and IT managers with a serious dilemma: how to do it right, but get to market while they're still relatively young.
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