Research on application-level multicast seeks to combine the merits of unicast and IP multicast while avoiding their drawbacks. Efficient error recovery in such a system is still a difficult problem. Current research is primarily focused on developing local error recovery techniques, but these techniques would not work with shared losses, which often occur in application-level multicast. This paper presents a novel multimedia streaming framework called peer-paired pyramid streaming (P3S) which is basically a hybrid client/server and peer-to-peer structure. In P3S, clients are hierarchically organized with those at the same level coupled as peer pairs. P3S uses some controlled delay between packets that are vulnerable to shared losses to reduce the shared losses. The technique is verified by both theoretical and experimental results. Research on application-level multicast seeks to combine the merits of unicast and IP multicast and avoiding their drawbacks. Efficient error recovery in such a system is still a difficult problem. Current research is primarily on developing local error recovery techniques, but these works would be This paper presents a novel multimedia streaming framework called peer-paired pyramid streaming (P3S) which is basically a hybrid client / server and peer-to-peer multicast. In P3S , clients are hierarchically organized with those at the same level coupled as peer pairs. P3S uses some controlled delay between packets that are vulnerable to shared losses to reduce the shared losses. The technique is verified by both theoretical and experimental results.