number of bits per second this information is useful for comparing with the processing capabilities of the video decoder 1008 running on the client indeed this provides an indication of the potential risk of buffer overflow and also indicates whether some download time saving is possible for a given media segment the download time information is stored in media segments list 1003 in step 304 the computed download deadline for the respective media segment is stored as a di parameter in the media segment representation in the list of media segments 1003 the next step 306 comprises checking whether the current_time corresponds to a deadline for one of the active media segments to be downloaded if this is not the case the display process of fig2 is returned to after step 306 if a download deadline is reached for a subsequent media segment step 307 comprises checking whether or not the associated connection is active status parameter active in media segment list 1003 the different states of a connection one connection is associated with one media segment are represented in fig5 at start time step 201 of fig2 all connections are inactive and may even not be created represented by inactive.