History and development of streaming media

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The history and development of streaming media in the narrower sense begins in the mid-1990s, while forerunners can be found at least from the mid-1980s.

Early internet

As a packet-based data network, the Internet was multimedia capable from the very beginning ; However, there was initially a lack of sufficient bandwidth , suitable protocols , ideas for attractive applications and suitable users . This initial situation initially changed in the academic field due to the massive expansion of the available bandwidths from the late 1980s and pilot projects as part of the multicast backbone .

In the time before the Web was established , multimedia files were mostly made available on the Internet as compressed sound or video files; formats such as .au ( audio ) and .wav ( wave ) were often used for audio files . The files then had to be completely downloaded to the local computer and then usually decompressed manually . Only then could the files be played back or edited with a suitable application.

Growth phase

After the introduction (1989) and establishment (around 1993) of the graphical Internet user interface of the World Wide Web , the previously elite technology became attractive to broader sections of the population. The first private Internet Service Providers (ISP) offered network access and the media began to report on the global network.

The Trojan Room Coffee Machine from ATM Networks , which went online in 1992 , was one of the first attempts to provide images and sounds live over the network . It was a kind of level indicator of the company's own coffee machine , which was recorded three times per minute by a black and white camera and digitized in a computer with software that was written by the company. Similar applications spread under the name webcam in the following years .

As early as 1995, the then newly founded Info-Radio Berlin-Brandenburg organized by ORB and SFB together with the Technical University of Berlin organized the streaming service Info-Radio on Demand .

The SWF carried out a similar project : Part of the SWF broadcast archive was digitized here. By mid-1995, there were already over 190,000 hours of spoken and musical contributions.

In 1997 radio SAW was one of the first radio stations in Germany to start a live stream on the Internet.

Commercialized Internet

Streaming as a relevant usage option for broader groups of users, however, required the development of an attractive user interface, which was only given from the mid-1990s onwards with the establishment of the World Wide Web (WWW) and its commercialization . Established companies discovered the WWW with its numerous possibilities for company presentation and start-ups began to develop new usage concepts , supported by massive investments in risk capital .

Streaming boom

The media public became aware of streaming media around 1998, in the heyday of the New Economy , when hardly any investor asked about serious business models . During this hype phase, the strangest ideas were developed and some of them were put into practice. The extremely expensive streaming productions were only feasible in this environment. It used a kind of automatic forced access, for example numerous radio stations began to stream parts of their programs simply because others were doing it too.

According to statistics from 1999, US Internet users spent an average of two hours a week online (Nielsen / NetRatings, May 1999), with over 56% accessing them through AOL and another 37% through other dial-up ISPs. Assuming a limited time budget for media use, it is obvious why streaming could not reach a mass market: The time budget reserved for online use was still far too low and the access costs too high to allow widespread adoption of the established mass media .

In March 2001, the market research company NetValue determined that the Germans were “streaming grouches”: just under 14 percent of German Internet users took advantage of streaming offers, in the USA it was around 15, in Denmark just under 15 and in Spain even almost 20 percent. While the average user in the United States consumed more than 60 minutes of streams a day, the usage time in Germany was limited to around 12 minutes.

The phase of the Internet boom also saw the brief heyday of webcasting , which is often mentioned in connection with streaming technologies. However, It is not so much a technology but rather a push - form of distribution . The term webcasting is sometimes used synonymously with Internet radio , but then it has nothing to do with the corresponding push offers of the 1990s.

One of the first major streaming events was the NetAid concert in October 1999, which had been heralded as "the greatest multimedia event in history"; the eleven-hour concert was held in three locations - New York , London and Geneva - and broadcast by various radio and television stations in 132 countries; In addition, there was a parallel transmission via streaming on the Internet, for which 300 Linux servers were used. The encoding was done in RealMedia format, but annoyed many listeners with dropouts, poor sound and image quality and asynchronous sound and image transmission. Here it became clear that streaming media was still a long way from becoming a blanket competition to radio and television.

While Internet radio stations had virtually "broadcast" in a lawless area for years, disillusionment set in at the beginning of 2001: Due to the legal uncertainty regarding music licenses, many "broadcasters" shut down after the American Copyright Office had demanded additional fees. In addition to the ongoing disputes over license fees , the reason for this was the broadcast of advertising , the production costs of which were to be partially financed by the internet radio stations. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) sued the new fee schedule and was able to achieve a slight reduction in the required fee rates.

With the onset of the crisis in the New Economy in 2001, AOL Time Warner began to exploit the music licenses acquired with Spinner.com online . Spinner.com offered around 150 pre-formatted music streams from a license pool of around 375,000 titles free of charge.

The online service provider T-Online , equipped with a comfortable financial cushion, also opposed the downward trend in March 2003 and launched its broadband portal T-Online Vision , which among other things offered live streams in television quality and video chats with celebrities.

Internet crisis

With the crisis of the internet economy and the transformation of the new economy into conventional business models, disillusionment and realism also set in in the streaming area. Streaming offers were increasingly critically examined for their refinancing ability and adjusted accordingly. After the awareness that internet offers for a mass audience were subject to completely different economic principles than for traditional mass media, numerous start-ups began to die out at the beginning of the 21st century, as well as a fundamental re-evaluation of streaming technology.

For example, Intel discontinued its Internet Media Services (IMS) just a few months after the start, as it was unclear whether and when this line of business would become profitable; With the IMS, the group had tried to build a global streaming infrastructure similar to Akamai .

Market situation from 2000

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In the early 2000s, streaming applications only played a subordinate role; Only strategically operating corporations or public broadcasters took risks. Anything that did not pay off in the short term was usually not produced; this was especially true for complex web presentations and streaming video , while music streaming gradually established itself.

A new, comparatively profitable business area opened up from around 2002 for the newly emerging online music services , for which peer-to-peer networks such as Napster had prepared the field. For example, RealNetworks took over the music portal Listen.com in April 2003 for a purchase price of 36 million US dollars; to Listen.com belonged to the music service Rhapsody , who possessed several major record labels about licenses and offering music for download from the Internet. Rhapsody was intended to complement RealNetworks' streaming offering; At the beginning of 2004 550,000 songs were available for download and 625,000 for streaming . Similar offers operated or operate u. a. Microsoft ( MSN Music ) and Apple . The latter company also started the iTunes Store in April 2003 , which offers more than two million titles from all five major labels Sony Music , Universal Music , BMG , EMI and Warner Music .

Apple has been supporting the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) mobile communications standard with QuickTime versions since June 2003. Real Networks has also signed various cooperation agreements with UMTS operators, including with AT&T Wireless and Sprint from the USA, Telefónica Móviles from Spain, Wind and TIM from Italy, Vodafone and mmO₂ from Great Britain and TeliaSonera from Sweden. The plan was to bring multimedia content to cell phones with the Helix Universal Mobile Platform . This platform included a. the RealPlayer Mobile , the RealNetworks Helix Mobile Producer , the Helix Universal Server Mobile , the Helix Service Delivery Suite as well as the Helix Universal Server and the Universal Gateway mobile . (Status: 2004).

The larger companies active in the field of video streaming include the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Online, which has been using its broadband portal T-Online Vision Films from the studios Dreamworks , Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , Universal Studios and Constantin Film via Offers streaming for a fee. In the beginning, however, it was not a question of streaming, rather the content was downloaded to the customer's computer overnight and could then be started from the hard drive of the set-top box .

T-Online presented the streaming world premiere on the occasion of the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2004 with the concert film Lightning in a Bottle , which was offered as video-on-demand streaming, although this was only accepted with moderate success.

As the first major pay-per-view event, German Internet users were able to watch the second season of Big Brother in 2000. Anyone who wanted to access the images from all 28 cameras had to pay for them. According to Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks, this event was the second largest streaming project in the world to date, after the release of the Clinton tape .

With an initiative called TriplePlay, the industry wanted to lure hesitant consumers into broadband Internet. Voice-over-IP and the use of multimedia content should find their way into private households, united on one end device. Numerous manufacturers wanted to show solutions at CeBIT 2005. Shift TV presented the first internet-based video recorder; the customer could record and manage his own individual TV program. The programs were accessed like e-mails, and the content was then streamed.

Since UMTS was introduced in 2003, there have been new areas of application for streaming media in the area of ​​mobile devices. Back then, innovative services such as mobile TV and video telephony created new areas of application for streaming media. Involved in this were u. a. the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems and GoVid.

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