Chapter 29. How the Net Provides Video and Audio on Demand
TODAY you use the World Wide Web to listen to Mozart and watch Super Bowl highlights, but the Internet began as a text-only medium. In fact, the Internet was a multimedia late-bloomer compared to personal computers. That’s because the problem of how to handle the necessarily huge amounts of data involved in graphics, audio, and videos was easier to solve on the desktop than on the Internet.
Conveniently, there’s a name for the problem: bandwidth. The term is used to describe how much data you can push across a network, a computer bus, or any of the many other data pathways that let components ...
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