A method for multimedia playback and transmission to wireless clients is described. A host webserver transcodes a live digital or analog audio-visual or audio broadcast signal and splits the input stream into small multimedia objects of an efficient compression such as MPEG4/AAC, and then immediately deploys the objects to distributed content servers for a geographically dispersed population of wireless clients. A java applet object player, downloaded to wireless clients at the beginning of the multimedia on-demand session, interprets and decodes the multimedia objects as they are received, using multiple levels of optimization. The applet uses novel video and audio decoding optimizations which can be generically applied to many digital video and audio codecs, and specifically decodes Simple Profile MPEG4 video and Low Complexity AAC audio.