This article is part of Streaming Media s What Is series.
Executive Summary
Streaming media production starts with the infinite real world as captured by the lenses of our camcorders, and ends with the tightly compressed files necessary for streaming delivery. Along the way, the video is digitized, encoded, re-encoded, and frequently transcoded, with possible stops along the way for transrating, transsizing, and transmuxing.
These are terms we use every day, but few, if any, have precise definitions. Until now. Read on for our attempt to bring clarity to the lexicon of streaming media workflows and processes as we follow the life of a video from capture to consumption (on multiple platforms, of course).