Abstract Current Internet and intranet development is focusing attention on networked multimedia services involving the transport of real-time multimedia streams over IP. Several important networked applications and services such as Internet TV and high quality video conferencing are based on MPEG-2 audio and video streaming. In this paper, we discuss our implementation of a client/server system for the real-time delivery of MPEG-2 encoded audio/video streams over the IP networks based on the real-time transport protocol (RTP). This system was designed using off-the-shelf hardware and commercial operating systems. We emphasized a cost-effective design that delivers acceptable quality audio and video under packet loss rates as high as 10 −1.