A multimedia server delivers presentations (such as videos, 
movies, games), providing high bandwidth and continuous 
real-time delivery.  In this paper we present techniques 
for reducing the initial latency of presentations, that is, 
for reducing the time between the arrival of a request and 
the start of the presentation.  Traditionally, initial 
latency has not received much attention.  This is 
because one major application of multimedia servers is 
``movies on demand'' where a delay of a few minutes
before a new multi-hour movie starts is acceptable.
However, latency reduction becomes important in
interactive applications such as video games and browsing 
multimedia documents.  Various latency reduction schemes 
are examined and proposed, and their performance compared.
Analysis shows that on-disk partial data replication
technique can significantly reduce (almost eliminate in 
some cases) initial latency without adversely affecting 
throughput.  The on-disk partial data replication scheme 
that we propose proves far more cost effective than any 
previous attempts to reduce initial latency.