The article discusses the outstanding aspects of the wireless channel and the challenges and opportunities they introduce for streaming media. Streaming technology has a number of fundamental characteristics that distinguished it from generic data for which most wireless protocols are designed. This would mean that solutions made for media distribution in wired contexts do not directly transform into an appropriate wireless solutions. A number of examples are discuss such as how channel, source and application-dependent concepts such as multiuser diversity, opportunistic communications, loss tolerance and differing application-dependent delay constraints can be overworked to introduce new and useful constructs for streaming media over wireless.