Somehow you made it all the way through school without being good at math. And now as a Web designer, there is certain smugness in knowing that your artistic side won out. That is, until you discovered that your streaming media does not play right. It is erratic and choppy. With horror, you discover you must now master “bandwidth math.” You scream with terror.

Not to worry. The basic concepts behind getting your material to stream smoothly are pretty simple. And if the math drives you crazy, a calculator or spreadsheet will help you through most of the rough spots. In fact, many a math-challenged designer will find their authoring tools ready to help them figure out the numbers behind the streaming.

“Bandwidth Math”
So what is “bandwidth math?” Bandwidth mathematics is all about determining how much data you can move in a given amount of time. No matter what your site visitor is hooked up to, they have some kind of limitation on how fast they can receive data you transmit to them. Move too much data too fast and something has to choke up. Your job is to give them as much as they can receive without overdoing it.

Before your head spins any further, think of it in this way. Imagine someone gives you a garden hose hooked up to a fire hydrant. Then they turn the hydrant on full. The hydrant is now feeding more water than the garden hose can physically handle. You discover pretty quickly that hooking up a garden hose to a fire hydrant is all wet.

Of course, if you turn the hydrant on slowly and keep the volume of water turned down, it just might work. You might even be able to take blasts of water for short period of time as long as you turn it down immediately afterward.

Streaming is about Time
This is how it works for streaming media. Send too much audio, video, images, or animation and the user experience will break down. Instead of a relatively smooth experience, your user will see choppy and incomplete media. If you can fit what their Internet connection can handle, the experience will smooth out. Depending on the type of streaming you are using, you might even be able to feed bursts of increased data. That is, as long as you have calculated the numbers and determined that you will not overload the system at that given moment in time. Time is the most important (and foreign) factor in bandwidth math. Success in streaming media is all about how much data you move in a given period of time.