It seems like it's been forever since streaming media has been the Page One story on the Internet, what with dot-com mania followed by dot-com disaster and now dot-com recovery. In real time, however, it's been relatively brief. Streaming media has only been around as a major player for a couple of years. Before 1999, it was just a lot of visionaries playing around with trying to fit sound and pictures through some very small pipelines.

Streaming Media World was catapulted into existence when it began to look like streaming was the wave of the future. Since we came on board in late summer of '99, we have been on an ever-changing rollercoaster ride of news, technologies, resources, and opinions that haven't stood still for a moment. Although that ride for some of the people and companies we covered might at times better be compared to a bucking bronco, after surfing through the Millennium and coming out the other side, streaming has turned out, indeed, to be the wave of the future. Or rather, it's the wave we're all riding right now, in the present.

Choppy waters have thrown a lot of companies to the sharks in the last six months, but it is of note that not a single story we have done in covering this beat has been about an eventual dot-com failure. Not one. For whatever reason, our seventy-plus feature articles on file are all success stories. Not every one has turned out to be a millionaire's tale, but everybody's still on line and going strong. A good track record, we think, for all concerned.

By "we," we mean the editorial combination of myself and my partner and PR/cameraperson Susan. We have comprised a more journalistic end of SMW and cannot take credit for the voluminous lessons, tutorials, and technical reviews that make up the larger part of this site. Nevertheless, we have had the honor of introducing you to some of the biggest players in the business, and a host of smaller ones, and this seems like the perfect time to reintroduce you to some of what you might have missed or is worth an updated look.

Early on, before broadband began to more generally grace the landscape, streaming focused on audio, and so did we. Coming as we do from a background of recording studio design and production, we thought the Internet was just the place to be. But how to go about it? To start with, how about Mastering Audio For The Internet?