ELI5: How does streaming work?

Imagine you want to read a book but it's really, really long. You don't want to buy the whole book and carry it everywhere, right?

Streaming is like borrowing the book from a library, but instead of taking the whole book at once, you read it a little bit at a time.

Here's how it works:

• The movie, song, or video game (that's your book) is stored on a big computer somewhere far away called a server. Think of this as the library's shelf.

• When you click "play" on your phone or TV, your device (like your reading glasses!) sends a request to the server to start sending the movie to you. This request is like telling the librarian which book you want.

• The server doesn't send the whole movie at once. Instead, it breaks the movie into small pieces called data packets. Imagine the librarian tearing out a few pages at a time.

• These data packets travel over the internet (like a special delivery truck) to your device.

• Your device receives the data packets and puts them back together in the correct order so you can watch the movie smoothly. It's like your reading glasses helping you read the pages in the right order.

• While you're watching, your device is constantly asking for more data packets to keep the movie playing.

• If the internet is slow (the delivery truck is stuck in traffic!), the movie might pause or get blurry because your device isn't getting the data packets fast enough. This is called buffering.