Streaming media is a killer application in the future communication system.The key technologies of the distributed system for streaming media are discussed.The research state based on CDN (Content Distributed Network) and P2P (Peer to Peer) for streaming media is presented.For streaming media based on CDN scheduling algorithms, proxy caching algorithms andinteractive operations are discussed.For streaming media based on P2P data assignment algorithms, incentive mechanism, placement of media objects, multicast technology on the application layer and interactive operations are discussed.Finally, some issues to be further studied are pointed to.