There are many businesses that can use streaming video to their advantage. Companies that sell training materials are most obvious. Because streaming media can be played upon demand, employees and/or customers can view materials when they have time to concentrate on content. This is a valuable selling tool, especially if your customer has employees in remote locations. Your encoding company can also set up your materials to be password protected; this is especially attractive to corporations who would like to use Internet for internal communications.

Streaming video is also an excellent choice for product demonstrations, especially when product's features are difficult to explain using only text or still pictures. Caterers and restaurants can give potential customers tours of their facilities or show clips of some of their "special events" such as weddings. Hotels can show corporate accounts their meeting rooms, accommodations, and leisure-time facilities. Country clubs can take new members to golf course or have them take lessons from golf pro. Health clubs can show-off their gym facilities and amenities in locker rooms. Realtors can take interested buyers, especially those in cities far away, on a tour of town in which a property is located. Universities could showcase their laboratories, their libraries, or their dormitory facilities. The list could go on and on...

I hope that in these three articles I've whetted your interest in utilizing streaming media to enhance your web site. Just remember following: 1. Find a company that is reputable and understands what you are trying to accomplish at your web site. (For a list of companies that are members of RealNetworks Design and Production Agencies, see: http://real.com/devzone/solutions/design). 2. Be certain that samples of their own work meet your criteria for professionalism. (Warning: if a video pauses during playback, this is not fault of producer or of video stream. It could be net congestion or a heavy amount of traffic on site!) 3. Do not judge on price alone! Turnaround time, hosting capabilities, and technical knowledge have associated costs that are often overlooked.

Streaming media is affordable, enjoyable, and is only going to grow in importance to those of us doing business on web. Enhance your web site, your business, and profits at your bottom line with streaming media...it's a sound business decision.

- Animation - You can tie together multiple images to create animation.

The problems of GIF are:

- GIF uses a proprietary encoding/decoding scheme called LZW (Lempel Zev Welch). This scheme is patented by Unisys, who has been sending out letters demanding compensation from some companies who have created commercial image applications.

- GIF images can only include 256 colors.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) - Another very common format on internet. JPEG (also known as JPG) images use a lossy compression scheme. This means that as you optimize your image bits are removed. When image is decompressed, bits are interpolated. This means that as you use greater and greater compression, your image tends to get fuzzier and fuzzier.

This format is best for images with gradients, such as paintings and photos. Images with sharp definition, such as clipart and text, should be saved as GIF or PNG.

JPEG images can often be compressed to smaller sizes than exact same image in GIF format, although some definition may be lost. Depending upon image, this may or may not be important.

The main reason why JPEG images would be used instead of GIF is that JPEG's support more than 256 colors.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) - PNG is a new, up-and-coming format. PNG has all of features of GIF except for animation, and PNG has advantage of allowing for more than 256 colors. In addition, compression algorithm of PNG is public domain and non-lossy (bits of image are not lost), which makes it superior to both GIF and JPG.

All of newer browsers support PNG format, including Netscape and Internet Explorer. You should still use this format with caution, as older browsers do not support it at all. Thus, if you use format you are more-or-less locking out those who have not upgraded their browsers.