[Media] The difference between streaming and progressive downloading

When delivering online videos there are generally two distinct ways to do it: Progressive downloading and streaming.

Progressive downloading is literally downloading the media and plays although the whole downloading is not finished. Popular example is youtube. You can see the downloading progress in the red bar while you are watching video. It has virtually very large receive buffer. It means that if network is really fast, you can immediately download the whole media and play it.

Streaming is stream the media without saving it. Means it has limited receiver buffer. Thus, although the network is very fast, you are receiving the speed of the original media rate.

Streaming is more suitable for live-streaming, web-chatting while progressive downloading for watching stored media such as movies, etc.