An average internet user watches around 19 hours of video content a week, or almost 3 hours a day. With this, streaming surpasses TV as the most popular means of consuming video content. Most of it is entertainment, news, and sports, along with educational content like courses and webinars we follow online. Today, we take streaming for granted - but you can’t help but marvel at the amazing evolution it has gone through in the last few decades. Today, let’s take a look at where streaming started, and how it became the global phenomenon we all use today.
It all started with sound
Progressive Networks was founded by Rob Glaser, who should be remembered as the granddaddy of everything streaming. The company launched its first streaming product, RealAudio, in 1995, which was followed by RealVideo in 1997. Considering the bandwidth available at the time, the quality of the streams was very poor by today’s standards. But this didn’t stop it from becoming the first widely adopted video streaming format, setting the scene for what was to come.
At the same time, Microsoft developed and launched its own streaming standard, NetShow, and Apple created its own QuickTime Streaming standard.
Flash stirred things up in the 2000s
Macromedia Flash - later acquired by Adobe - stirred things up a bit in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Originally used as a tool to create interactive multimedia content online, it later introduced powerful streaming capabilities that made it the dominant streaming standard online.
Flash had several strong points compared to its competitors, like its cross-platform compatibility, ability to buffer, adaptive streaming, and interactive elements. All these made it a superior standard, offering viewers a much better experience with fewer interruptions and better interaction.
Flash also added a new layer of interaction to streaming videos, which ultimately led to the emergence of an innovative form of entertainment: live dealer casino games. Here, players can follow games like blackjack, roulette, and baccarat in real-time from a real live person, who acts as the dealer, interact with players, and manages the gameplay, all this from a professional studio or a land-based casino.
Flash became the dominant streaming platform in the early 2000s, with some of the biggest names, including YouTube, using it to deliver content online.
“Thoughts on Flash” and the emergence of new formats
Flash remained the dominant standard for streaming for the better part of the decade, but this didn’t stop the emergence and development of other formats, including DivX, Windows Media Video, MPEG-4, and H.264. While it was dominating the landscape, Flash had many issues with its performance and reliability.
Steve Jobs’ letter “Thoughts on Flash”, an open letter published in 2010, best described the issues with Flash at the time: he argued that the platform is prone to crashes, consumes lots of resources, and impacts the battery life of mobile devices. As he was one of the most influential tech evangelists of those years, his thoughts had a serious impact on the streaming landscape: developers started transitioning away from Flash and toward alternative standards, embracing HTML5 and other open web standards as a more reliable, secure, and mobile-friendly alternative.
But even before that, the online world started to distance itself from Flash video, embracing a format that offered better quality, compatibility, standardization, and the availability of hardware acceleration: H.264, or AVC.
Where streaming is today and where it’s going
Today’s streaming ecosystem is dominated by the H.264 standard, developed and released by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO/IEC) in 2003. H.264 offers a balance between video quality and compression efficiency, making it the perfect choice for a variety of streaming platforms and devices. While it is the gold standard today, it’s not the ultimate streaming codec: next-generation standards like H.265 and VP9 are already available. Parts of the industry are already transitioning to these new standards offering even better compression. This means higher-resolution video over slower internet connections.
Final words
The evolution of streaming video from RealPlayer to H.264 has been a remarkable journey. From the early attempts at video streaming to the rise of Flash and its subsequent decline, the streaming landscape has witnessed significant advancements. H.264 emerged as a dominant standard, offering high-quality video compression and compatibility, but new standards are already in line to replace it. All this to give us crips visuals and high-quality sound while not overloading the existing infrastructure.
No comments yet