Interactive multimedia applications require short initial latency. Initial latency increases as the buffer size allocated to each user request increases. Hence, the buffer size must be minimized. This paper proposes a buffer allocation scheme (DyBASe) that dynamically allocates the minimum buffer size to user requests based on the number of user requests in service. Through analysis and simulation, we show that DyBASe reduces the average initial latency by 31-65% compared with the existing static one. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.