Abstract: We have developed a real-time operating system kernel which has been used to support the transmission and reception of streams of live digital audio and video in real-time as part of a workstation-based conferencing application. An experimental environment consisting of a number of workstations interconnected with a 16 Mbit token ring has been created and used to evaluate quantitatively the performance of the kernel and conferencing application, as well as the quality of the conferences they are capable of supporting. Our early experiences with these systems are described.