Modern Internet streaming services have utilized various techniques to improve the quality of streaming media deliv-ery. Despite the characterization of media access patterns and user behaviors in many measurement studies, few stud-ies have focused on the streaming techniques themselves, particularly on the quality of streaming experiences they of-fer end users and on the resources of the media systems that they consume. In order to gain insights into cur-rent streaming services and thus provide guidance on de-signing resource-efficient and high quality streaming media systems, we have collected a large streaming media work-load from thousands of broadband home users and business users hosted by a major ISP, and analyzed the most com-monly used streaming techniques such as automatic protocol switch, Fast Streaming, MBR encoding and rate adaptation. Our measurement and analysis results show that with these techniques, current streaming systems tend to over-utilize CPU and bandwidth resources to provide better services to end users, which may not be a desirable and effective way to improve the quality of streaming media delivery. Moti-vated by these results, we propose and evaluate a coordina-tion mechanism that effectively takes advantage of both Fast Streaming and rate adaptation to better utilize the server and Internet resources for streaming quality improvement.