Summary
The most important things to understand about Internet delivery of video content are:
Delivery of video or audio over the Internet is far more complex than traditional systems such as television, radio, or telephone.
The architecture of the Internet makes it likely that video will drop out, pause, or stutter.
UDP, not TCP, are the transport protocols of choice. Unfortunately, many corporate networks block all UDP traffic, and some block all traffic except HTTP. Multimedia protocols are forced to "tunnel" through firewalls by appearing as HTTP traffic.
The major streaming media protocols are the RTP family and Microsoft's MMS protocol.