Streaming

Delivering a piece as it plays rather than after it arrives. Convenience for the viewer, a new set of constraints for the maker.

Streaming plays the beginning before the end has arrived, trading the wait for a dependency: the pipe must keep up with the picture, second by second. For the viewer it feels like abundance; for the maker it means the file's structure, not just its size, decides whether playback survives.

The maker's constraints are real: bitrate must ride under the audience's realistic bandwidth, keyframes must land where seeking wants them, and the opening seconds must be light enough to start instantly, because the modern viewer forgives nothing before the first frame. Design the file for the journey, not just the destination.