stream

A body of running water.

Natural water course containing water at least part of the year. The type of runoff where water flows in a channel. See ephemeral stream, gaining stream, incised stream, intermittent stream, losing stream, or perennial stream.

A stream is simply a byte-stream of data that is sent from a sender to a receiver. There are two basic categories, so the java.io package includes two abstract classes (InputStream and OutputStream).

A flow of data into or out of a process as a steady sequence of bytes or characters, without the appearance of being broken up into packets. This is a kind of "interface"--the underlying "implementation" may well break your data up into separate packets for delivery, but this is hidden from you.

A media file that is transmitted in a continuous flow over a network. Streams are of two types, live and on-demand.