Streaming of Multimedia with Reduced Start-Up Delay

High quality multimedia streaming applications over the Internet require very low packet loss rates. The Internet is characterized by long bursts of packet losses and delays. A large receiver buffer can be used to mitigate the effects of packet losses and delays. However, a large receiver buffer introduces a large delay in the playback of a packet. This large delay could be annoying at the start of a program or during switch over to another channel in a multi-channel broadcast. In this letter we introduce a separate low-delay tuning stream to address this start-up problem. In the steady state, this tuning stream is synchronized appropriately with the high-delay steady state stream to give a enhanced composite signal.