QuickTime provides a set of APIs that enable you to stream multimedia content over a network in real time, as opposed to downloading that content and storing it locally prior to presentation. With streaming, the timing and speed of transmission as well as the display of data are determined by the nature of the content rather than the speed of the network, server, or the client. Thus, a one minute long QuickTime movie is streamed over a network so that it can be displayed or presented in one minute of real time.
In the QuickTime streaming architecture, a stream is, simply, a track in a movie. QuickTime lets you stream a broad variety of content -- audio, video, text, and MIDI; the output of any audio or video codec supported in QuickTime can be streamed, in fact. If your application is QuickTime-savvy, you can automatically take advantage of this multimedia streaming capability.
In addition to demonstrating some useful techniques for displaying QuickTime movies, this section shows you how to play a streaming movie from a URL. It builds on the concepts and examples discussed in the previous sections and shows you how to