Limitations of flash Action Script 2.0

Very recently When i was working for a project based on Red5 flash server and Flash 8 with Action Script 2.0. My requirement was to fetch the number of images from the web server and render them on flash client repeatedly after n milliseconds. To avoid the flickering i used double buffering. But the problem was the time it was taking to load the images from server and then render them. I was using the MovieClipLoader loadClip function to dynamically load the jpeg files, Though the size of each jpeg was not more than 15 KB, but it was taking around 3-4 seconds to load 16 jpeg images of size less than 15 KB. This was very frustating as i was getting the updated images after 3-4 seconds. How good if flash provide some kind of sockets in Action script 2.0, by using that i can transfer the image object as binary data and then draw it on flash client.I am really missing this functionality in flash to send image data either using Flash remoting. They have kept it for their own product called Flash communication server.. I am still looking for a solution that can minimize the time required to load these images from web server. If i can reduce it to 1 sec on higher bandwidth, It would be great.