Audience: Who is your audience? What kind of connection do they have? Will they be viewing from their home or office, or from COD? This information helps the technical staff set up your presentation for a wide distribution or for a focused group of viewers.

Player: All users must have Windows Media Player to view streaming media. This player is a free download from the Microsoft site. Once downloaded, it must be installed by following the instructions from the Microsoft download site (search for Windows Media Player). Users only need to download the player one time.

On your own pages, you may need to direct other users to the Microsoft site so they may use the player to view your content.

All networked computers on campus will already have the Player loaded for student and faculty use.

Network congestion: Network congestion can be seen in stalled playback and performance problems when playing streaming media. This usually means the network is very busy. Though general network congestion is unavoidable, the streaming server attempts to compensate by maintaining a constant connection. In contrast, a web server may simply freeze.

Copyrighted Material: If you plan to use copyrighted material in your presentation, you will need to obtain written permission and submit a copy of that permission to Multimedia Services.

Availability: Once the content has been uploaded to the server, it is available immediately. How long will media be available? Because servers have a finite storage capacity and are shared by many users, a policy has been set that content will be made available to users for up to one year and then it will be removed.

File Protection: Unlike other Internet delivered media files, when users view your streaming media, they are not downloading the file to their computer. The content remains on the server. Besides making the viewing process easier and faster, this also means that the streaming media content can't be downloaded to a user's drive and redistributed.

File Size: In general, media files are huge! To reduce them to a manageable size, streaming media technology compresses each file. This process requires some compromise as compressing the file sacrifices some audio and video quality. However, Multimedia Services will work with you to determine how much data can be eliminated and still deliver clean streaming media to your audience.