Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in

Excellent.

Interactive sound design capabilities

Fair. Format is designed primarily for streaming audio.

Simple synchronized media presentations such as slide shows, audio with moving text, captions, and pictures.

Software cost for encoding and streaming

Free.

Must have NT/Windows 2000.

Level of documentation and support

Good.

Audio encoding and content generation

Easy.

Audio authoring and delivery

Medium.

Requires Windows NT expertise. Windows Media Server comes pre-installed on NT.

Audio fidelity and compression

Good.

Low-bandwidth performance

Good.

Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming

Excellent -- Microsoft NT/Windows 2000 Server.

Windows Media provides good support for large-scale broadcasting of thousands of simultaneous steams. Does not support the Unix platform.