Capability
|
Rating
|
Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in
|
Excellent.
|
Interactive sound design capabilities
|
Fair. Format is designed primarily for streaming audio.
Simple synchronized media presentations such as slide shows, audio
with moving text, captions, and pictures.
|
Software cost for encoding and streaming
|
Free.
Must have NT/Windows 2000.
|
Level of documentation and support
|
Good.
|
Audio encoding and content generation
|
Easy.
|
Audio authoring and delivery
|
Medium.
Requires Windows NT expertise. Windows Media Server comes
pre-installed on NT.
|
Audio fidelity and compression
|
Good.
|
Low-bandwidth performance
|
Good.
|
Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale
streaming
|
Excellent -- Microsoft NT/Windows 2000 Server.
Windows Media provides good support for large-scale broadcasting of
thousands of simultaneous steams. Does not support the Unix platform.
|