What about quality?
Media producers, especially those with television backgrounds, often criticize the quality of streaming media. They miss the whole point. Streaming media isn't about quality. It's about access. It's about being able to sit in an office in Paris and receive content on-demand from Anchorage.

Surprisingly, most Internet users do get the point. Throughout the history of all forms of media, the new medium has often paled in comparison to the old one. But the new medium offers some capability that the old one does not. With streaming media, it is all about the access. The pictures may be fuzzy and the sound occasionally garbled. But when a Web user clicks on that link and gets media on-demand, that is power.

Fortunately, the streaming tools are rapidly growing more and more powerful. The quality today is significantly better than the quality six months ago. And it continues to improve at a phenomenal rate.

But what about all these formats?
One of the things that forces improvement in any technology is competition. That given, Web producers are often frustrated that there is no one fixed streaming standard. To that I ask, so what?

Let's think about our world for a minute. Look around you and the world is full of differences. There are different types of computers, different types of pets, different types of cars, different languages, different types of religions, different types of people. For all this talk about standards, the human race is pretty nonstandard group. In every crowd there is usually quite a few who see things differently. So while standards are an important goal, human nature (and money) will mean that something will always be unsettled.

Streaming media is all about making choices. What format does the best job in your situation? What technology do you like working with?