Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in

Excellent.

Interactive sound design capabilities

Fair. Technology is a compression format and widely used playback standard, not a multimedia authoring environment.

Software cost for encoding and streaming

Free to $1,000+.

Free to encode QuickTime and place downloadable files on web server. Large-scale managed streaming requires Mac OS X Server, which starts at over $1,000.

Level of documentation and support

Fair.

Audio encoding and content generation

Easy.

Audio authoring and delivery

Easy.

No programming expertise is required to set up Mac OS X Server.

Audio fidelity and compression

Excellent.

Q Design Music encoding technology.

Low-bandwidth performance

Excellent.

Server performance and quality of software tools for large-scale streaming

Good -- Mac OS X Server.

QuickTime support large-scale broadcasting. Number of streams depends on hardware configuration and bandwidth capacity.