| Capability
| Rating
|
| Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in
| Excellent.
|
| Interactive sound design capabilities
| Fair. Technology is a compression format and widely used playback standard, not a multimedia authoring environment.
|
| Software cost for encoding and streaming
| Free to $1,000+.
Free to encode QuickTime and place downloadable files on web server. Large-scale managed streaming requires Mac OS X Server, which starts at over $1,000.
|
| Level of documentation and support
| Fair.
|
| Audio encoding and content generation
| Easy.
|
| Audio authoring and delivery
| Easy.
No developing expertise is required to set up Mac OS X Server.
|
| Audio fidelity and compression
| Excellent.
Q Design Music encoding technology.
|
| Low-bandwidth performance
| Excellent.
|
| Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming
| Good -- Mac OS X Server.
QuickTime support large-scale broadcasting. Number of streams depends on hardware configuration and bandwidth capacity. |