Multimedia Support
If multimedia support is important to your site then you should spend the time (and money) needed to provide a level of service that will adequately meet your needs. To be fair, you cannot expect a great deal of support for a low budget hosting account. Serving multimedia files to your visitors will take up a lot of resources; particularly bandwidth.
Flash and Shockwave Animation
While Flash and Shockwave animations appear to be rather dynamic (in the sense that it is possible to change the way they work depending on your systems capabilities), they are in fact rather static in nature. They will work on any server that supports the MIME types that are associated with them and so do not require any specialist server software.
Flash and Shockwave presentations can be described as an interactive image, the presentations themselves are usually just a single file that can be downloaded to your computer before starting. This can prove to be a problem if you don't want your visitors to be able to store copies of the presentations on their computers, since the full presentation is likely to be downloaded before it can serve its purpose.
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL)
SMIL is a language that will allows greater flexibility in the presentation of audio, video, text, animation and graphics; you can reuse and remix these multimedia elements, reducing the need to create separate clips for each different version of a presentation. SMIL enables users to select viewing options when they are made available, for example to allow for their download speed or choice of language.
While not yet as versatile as Flash or Shockwave, it can provide an alternative by allowing the user and site owner a degree of flexibility about the use and combination of multimedia elements that are available to them on the server. In the future, SMIL could provide the means of adding timed elements (for example, rotating banners) without the need for a scripting language.
Streaming Media
The Internet has altered people's expectations of shopping and communication, we have learned to expect things to be much quicker than they used to be. When given a choice whether to wait for a large download to load, or have it start as soon as there is enough information buffered to play it while simultaneously downloading it; few are likely to wait.
Streaming media support is essential if you intend to host something like a live web cast, but if you are considering doing something like this, you may need to use a dedicated server set up specifically to deal with the requests and provide the resources needed. Even if you aren't broadcasting live events, you may still need specialist commercial streaming software to provide the functionality you require.
For a server to be able to stream media data, it needs to have at least one of the three recognized protocols installed; User Datagram Protocol (UDP), RealTime Streaming Protocol (RTSP) or RealTime Protocol (RTP). The main difference between these protocols and others such as HTTP or FTP is that they will carry on streaming the data regardless whether a packet was lost or not; data is not retransmitted if it is lost.
The most enjoyable multimedia presentations are those that you can control. RTSP is a two way streaming protocol that allows the visitor to interact with the media by sending messages back to the server to control which part of the presentation to send next. Of course, you can expect to pay considerably more for a server that supports RTSP as opposed to RTP.
How much? How Fast?
However you decide to serve up your multimedia files to the world, there is one thing you can be sure of, is that they take up both a lot of bandwidth and data transfer. It is not uncommon for audio and video clips to be over a megabyte; times that by even a modest number and you will begin to see the problems of having a few large files on your site, even if they aren't used all that often.
Your data transfer quota is something that you should consider carefully as frequent requests for large files will have your data transfer totals spinning! It is always a good idea to find out what the additional transfer costs will be and even the service level provider that is providing the bandwidth. Some people prefer to steer clear of low fees for additional data transfer, believing that you get what you pay for and that the price reflects the quality of service that a host can provide.
If you are going to make use of any kind of streaming media then your quality of bandwidth can become very important to you. These are the kinds of situations when you really should start to think about a host with a burstable bandwidth plan, as while you may pay that little extra for it each month, you really don't want to end up with an excessive bill for your bandwidth usage!