| 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.
|
| Level of documentation and support
| Good.
|
| Audio encoding and content generation
| Easy.
|
| Audio authoring and delivery
| Medium.
Requires Windows 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 Server.
Windows Media provides good support for large-scale broadcasting of thousands of simultaneous steams. Does not support the Unix platform. |