Abstract: For an end-to-end media streaming system, the Internet can be considered a black box in the middle that connects a client at one end to the server at the other end. In this paper, we present both ends' views of the streaming problems and review two approaches to these problems. The first approach, which is represented by scalable coding, is reactive in nature because it seeks to best adapt to the changing network conditions such as bandwidth fluctuation and packet loss. The reactive approach is helpful in keeping a stream uninterrupted and providing a graceful degradation, but offers no guarantee on quality of the streamed content and does not help solve server-side problems such as scalability. The other approach is proactive and has motivated recent development in content delivery networks. We show that a content delivery network helps improve quality and scalability of streaming, and can be complemented with a reactive approach like scalable coding.