Browser compatibility and percent of browsers with Plug-in

Excellent.

Interactive sound design capabilities

Limited. Format is designed for song compression and to allow electronic devices to communicate, not as a multimedia authoring environment.

Button rollovers.

Software cost for encoding and streaming

Free to $100+.

If you already have MIDI files, you can post them to a web server for free. To create your own MIDI, files you will need to purchase a MIDI editor such as Vision or Cubase.

Level of documentation and support

Limited/None.

Audio encoding and content generation

Difficult.

Must have familiarity with MIDI authoring environments such as Vision, Cubase, Performer, etc.

Audio authoring and delivery

Easy.

Easy to place MIDI files on a standard web server for playback.

Audio fidelity and compression

Fair.

Note, since MIDI is not a digital audio format but a form of music notation, audio fidelity is dependent on the user's sound card and sound engine.

Low-bandwidth performance

Outstanding

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

Poor/Fair -- HTTP pseudo-streaming from a standard web server.