streaming

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The transmission of digital audio or video, or its reception and playback, without first storing the data.

   Music streaming has largely replaced the sale of physical albums.

   The concert was delayed by problems with the streaming setup.

   Note

   The defining technical line is storage. Streamed data is played as it arrives, while a download is saved first and played afterward. The word has since grown from a technique into the name of a business. Brooks Barnes, in "In Hollywood, the Strikes Are Just Part of the Problem" (2023), writes of "the economics of streaming" as an industry's central puzzle. Mark Sweney (2021) counts its carbon footprint.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The live broadcast of video over the internet, transmitted to viewers as the events take place.

   Streaming has become the main way many gamers build an audience.

   The festival offered free streaming for fans who couldn't attend in person.

   Similarlivestreaming

   Note

   The short word standing in for livestreaming, used where the liveness is obvious from context. A gamer building an audience is broadcasting in real time. When a reader could take it as plain playback in the digital-media sense, the full word livestreaming removes the doubt.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of stream.

   Thousands of fans are streaming the concert from home tonight.

   Rainwater was streaming off the roof after the downpour.

   Note

   One spelling serves the verb's two grammars. Water streaming off a roof is intransitive and simply flows. Fans streaming a concert is transitive and takes an object, the Internet use. As a gerund it sits close to the digital-media noun: in "streaming is cheap" the verb and the noun are hard to tell apart, though only the verb can take a direct object.

4. 4
   adjective

   Flowing or moving onward in continuous succession, as fluid does in a stream.

   The streaming banners along the parade route caught the wind.

   Sunlight came through the windows in long, streaming rays.

   Similarflowing, running, fluid, fluent, free-flowing

   Oppositestill, static, stagnant

   Note

   An adjective that grew out of a participle. Middle English had stremande beside stremyng, and -ande was a participial ending. It is comparable (more streaming, most streaming) and suits whatever trails or pours onward, such as banners in the wind or rays of light. Fluent once shared this sense of "flowing"; onrushing adds speed and force to the same picture.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   The continuous movement of something along a path, as a stream flows.

   The steady streaming of refugees across the border continued for weeks.

   Photographers captured the streaming of starlings against the evening sky.

   Similarflow, flood, procession, movement, surge

6. 6
   nounUKuncountable

   The division of students into separate classes according to academic ability, a practice common in British schooling.

   The school introduced streaming in Year 7 to group pupils by ability.

   Critics argue that streaming can limit the progress of lower-ranked pupils.

   Similartracking

   Note

   A British school term, and a contested one. Streaming ranks pupils into classes by overall ability across subjects. Setting is the related practice that assigns levels one subject at a time. Tracking names the same idea. Peter Wilby, in The Guardian Weekly (2013), describes Finland as a country where sorting pupils this way is illegal.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   The working of loose alluvial deposits in order to obtain the ore they contain.

   Streaming recovered tin from the gravels long before shaft mining began.

   Generations of families made their living from streaming in the river valleys.

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