Continuous media streaming systems, like today's world-wide-web, will be a key component in the future information structure. Developing an understanding of this and the key challenges blocking it, namely reliability and scalability, is essential for the growth of this service and its availability to the masses.This title delivers this essential knowledge. The technology to build continuous media systems is introduced and comprehensively explained. It also provides a specific focus and an in depth treatment of recent research advances, such as parallel server architectures and multicast streaming architectures.Written by an author involved at the forefront of the development of this technology, it will be of immense value to senior undergraduate students and postgraduate students in multimedia courses, researchers and developers of continuous media systems and members of ACM and IEEE.