Multimedia Streaming has been a very popular topic for the past few years. There have been hot debates over whether streaming media will take over the television broadcast world. Most agree that it will be a long time coming. However, we have already witnessed tremendous growth in this field.

In this talk, I will first give some background on this topic, including the components that constitute multimedia streaming and possible killer applications that are likely to drive the evolution of underlying technologies in streaming. I will also identify three major challenges that we are currently facing, namely, bandwidth limitation, information loss, and large transmission latencies and jitters. Next, I will present my research work which addressed some of these challenges. For video transmission, I will discuss the basic ideas behind the design of a reconstruction-based transform-coding algorithm, which can be applied to conceal the artifacts due to packet losses when videos are streamed over

unreliable Internet. For image transmission, a hybrid coding and delivery approach will be presented and its corresponding tradeoffs involving delay and quality will be carefully analyzed.

In the end, I will point out future research directions in this area.