Streaming media: The evolution of a digital revolution
Imagine a world where you can watch your favorite show or listen to music without waiting for it to download in its entirety—streaming media has made this possible. Streaming refers to the delivery and playback of multimedia content over a network, allowing users to access and enjoy their favorite shows, movies, and songs instantly. But how did we get here? Let’s dive into the fascinating history and evolution of streaming media.
The Early Days: From Telemetering to Napster
Streaming didn’t just appear out of thin air; it has roots dating back to the mid-20th century. One of the earliest precursors was Grumman’s telemetry ground station, which could reconstruct serial telemetered data for continuous display purposes in 1969. This is considered one of the first examples of true “streaming” in the sense of reconstructing distortion-free serial data from packetized or blocked recordings.
Fast forward to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when consumer-grade personal computers became powerful enough to display various media. The internet was still in its infancy, but it was already showing promise for streaming content. In 1993, the band Severe Tire Damage performed live on the Internet, using up half of the total bandwidth available at that time.
The Rise of Streaming Services
RealNetworks and Microsoft were pioneers in popularizing online streaming in the 1990s. RealNetworks’ pioneering efforts included broadcasting a baseball game between the New York Yankees and Seattle Mariners over the Internet in 1995, while Microsoft developed ActiveMovie to support streaming media.
The first large-scale online live broadcast was Marc Scarpa’s Adam Yauch-led Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1996. Xing Technology also introduced StreamWorks and StarWorks products for on-demand MPEG-1 full-motion videos. These early efforts laid the groundwork for what would become a global phenomenon.
The Streaming Wars
By the late 2010s, streaming services were in fierce competition with each other. This “streaming wars” period saw platforms offering exclusive content and differentiating themselves through self-produced content. The Recording Industry Association of America reported that streaming services generated 34.3% of music industry revenue in 2015, growing by 29% from the previous year.
The global recorded music market grew for six consecutive years, driven by paid subscription streaming revenues which increased by 18.5%. By August 2020, the pandemic had streaming services busier than ever, with 12 million people joining new streaming services in the UK alone and global subscriptions skyrocketing to over 1 billion.
Streaming Media Today
Today, streaming media is a cornerstone of modern entertainment. Services like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ have become mainstream elements of the media industry. These platforms use recommender systems based on user view history and aggregated viewer data to suggest content, revolutionizing how we consume media.
The Future of Streaming
As technology continues to advance, streaming media is poised for even greater growth. The quality of interactions between servers and users depends on the workload of the streaming service. Deploying clusters of regional servers can improve performance by redirecting users to nearby servers. Designing network protocols for streaming media raises problems such as packet loss and corruption, but these challenges are being addressed with adaptive bitrate streaming over HTTP.
Streaming transport protocols like Adobe’s RTMP or RTP are used to distribute video to individual homes and users. The quality of interactions is affected by resource constraints in the service, and deploying clusters of regional servers can alleviate these issues. Multicast protocols were developed to reduce server and network loads resulting from duplicate data streams.
Peer-to-peer protocols arrange for prerecorded streams between computers, preventing server bottlenecks but raising technical issues. Content delivery networks (CDNs) use intermediate servers to distribute the load using internet-compatible unicast delivery. Media can be recorded through media players or screen recorders, and live-streaming platforms like Twitch may incorporate video on demand systems for automatic recording of live broadcasts.
Conclusion
The journey from early telemetering to today’s global streaming services is a testament to human ingenuity. Streaming media has transformed the way we consume entertainment, making it more accessible and interactive than ever before. As technology continues to evolve, the future of streaming looks bright, promising even more innovative ways for us to enjoy our favorite content.
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This page is based on the article Streaming media published in Wikipedia (retrieved on December 28, 2024) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
