Stream

A stream is audio that arrives as a continuous flow rather than as a complete file. In live production it is a signal moving across a network under a transport protocol such as SRT, Zixi, or RIST. Inside a media container such as MP4 or MXF it is one of the elementary audio or video streams the file carries. In the music industry a stream is a single play of a recording on a service, the unit royalties are counted in. Streamed delivery also sets the terms for real-time work, since processing has to keep pace with the flow instead of waiting for a finished file.