Vikram Goyal has been giving the Mobile Media API a thorough going-over, writing an entire book on the topic: Pro Java ME MMAPI: Mobile Media API for Java Micro Edition. But sometimes, ambition gets the best of you, and you want to go farther than today's tools will take you. That's the case with today's Feature Article, Experiments in Streaming Content in Java ME, in which he tries to coax MMAPI to go beyond playing small files and instead support live streaming media. He writes that since publishing the book, this has been a hot topic:

I have been inundated with requests to help readers with streaming content via MMAPI for Java enabled mobile devices. This topic was an important omission from the book, but one that was simply not feasible to include because of the lack of support for it within various MMAPI implementations. In this article, I will show you the results of experiments I have conducted since the publication of the book to stream content via MMAPI using a custom datasource.

It's important to know before you memorize all the details that while MMAPI can handle a streaming DataSource, it's not currently able to play that media to the device. Instead, what Vikram has is the results of an experiment that shows how far MMAPI gets you today, what the devices and the API need to change to be able to play streaming media, and the steps that will get you there once they do.