Bandwidth - the width of the band over which frequencies are transmitted. So what's a band? A band is a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, defined by the lowest and highest frequencies in it. The bandwidth is the difference between the highest and lowest frequencies. The greater the bandwidth, the greater the carrying capacity. The Federal Communications Commission allocates portions of the band. For example, the band for VHF television broadcast is defined from 54 to 88 million cycles per second. And, of course, the band contains many "channels".

CODEC - program/device that COmpresses/DECompresses digital video. xxx Cinepak and Indeo (Intel) are examples of CODEC's. See CODEC Central for an in-dept look at CODEC's.

Cookie - A "cookie" is a small piece of information, a virtual "sticky note", sent by a Web server to be stored, by your browser, on your hard drive. The cookie stores information about you and can be retrieved by the Website each time you visit there. Without them, sites would not be able to retain information about individual visits; thus, cookies store "state information." Cookies are passive files, typically used in .asp (Active Server Page) programming, and should not be confused with server-side databases that collect personal information you've voluntarily (or unwittingly) submitted. See Cookie Central

Download - process of transferring a file from system to another.

Frame rate - number of images per second displayed in a stream of video. 30 fps (see above) is considered full-motion, television-quality video.

Full-motion video - digital video running at 30 fps (NTSC - US standard). It does not necessarily fill the screen.

Full-screen video - digital video filling the entire screen (use 640 x 480 pixels) for typical graphic, not just a smaller window.

RealAudio - real-time, live audio on the Web. RealAudio highly compresses sound files to ship down the network. After front-loading a portion of the recording, the receiving player starts, pulling in remaining portions. This lets users begin listening as the sound file is being downloaded, hence "real-time", rather having to wait until downloading is complete. You can take a closer look/"listen" at http://www.real.com.

RealVideo - delivers "broadcast-quality" video over the Internet in real-tim. The software operates over modems operating at 28.8 Kbps and up. The beta version is available at http://www.real.com.

Streaming Audio/video - capability to begin playing media onthe client side before it has fully downloaded from the server side, i.e. begins playing as it is coming in, " in real-time." The major players are RealNetworks (RealAudio - the industry standard), Microsoft (Netshow - avoid this!) and Apple (" streaming" QuickTime).

Video, digital - Digitized video, i.e. video converted/compressed to file format. Formats: .AVI (Video for Windows) and .MOV (QuickTime - cross-platform for both Macintosh and Windows).