On 1999 September 26 a musical performance, taking place at McGill Universi
ty, was transmitted to an audience at New York University over the Internet
. While Internet streaming audio technologies have been in use for several
years, what made this event unique was the audience's experience of uninter
rupted, intermediate-quality multichannel audio (AC-3). In order to achieve
this result, a custom system was developed employing both TCP and UDP prot
ocols, and providing its own buffering and retransmission algorithms. The m
otivation for this approach is explored, and experiments justifying the dec
isions made are explained.