Real-time streaming of multichannel audio data over Internet

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.