Recently, active research has gone to application-level multicast that tries to bring all the merits of unicast and IP multicast together while avoiding their drawbacks. How to efficiently recover from errors in such a system is a difficult question yet to be answered. The current research focus is primarily on developing local error recovery techniques, but these techniques would not work in case of shared losses, which often occur in application-level multicast. In this paper, a novel multimedia streaming framework called peer-paired pyramid streaming (P/sup 3/S) is proposed. It is basically a hybrid client/server and peer-to-peer structure. In P/sup 3/S, clients are hierarchically organized and those at the same level are coupled and peer-pairs are then formed. Based on P/sup 3/S, we introduce some controlled delay between packets that are vulnerable to shared losses to combat with the shared losses. The proposed technique is supported by both theoretical and experimental results presented in this paper.