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It’s 1995, and I’m trying to watch a video on the Internet. I entered the longest, most convoluted URL I’ve ever seen into my AOL web browser to view a trailer for the long-awaited Paul WS Anderson movie. Mortal Kombat. I found it in a case Monthly electronic games, hidden at the bottom of a full-page advertisement for the film. Internet marketing at the time was an afterthought, and studios didn’t even care about having short, easy-to-remember web addresses for their major releases, let alone dedicated websites. (Star Trek Generations And Stargate They were among the few early exceptions.)
After the endless process of copying the URL from print, I gathered my family around our Packard Bell PC (powered by an Intel 486 DX processor and, say, 8MB of RAM), pressed return, and waited as the video slowly downloaded At a speed of 33.6 kilobits per second. Contact by telephone. And wait. It took 25 minutes to fully load. After gathering my family back together, I booted up the game and got a horribly compressed, low-res version of the trailer I’d been dreaming about for months. It was unwatchable. The sound was disgusting. But that was the moment I became obsessed with online video.
I imagined a future world beyond the CRT box set and limited cable TV subscription. After a time with VHS tapes, I could just type in a URL and enjoy a show or movie while eating one of Pizza Hut’s rehydrated pies Back to the future 2. The Internet will make it so.
Looking back now, almost 30 years later, and 20 years after Engadget came to life, I realize that my 11-year-old self was right. The advent of online video has transformed the Internet from a place where we surf the web, update LiveJournals, steal music, and chat with friends on AIM to a place where we can also sit back and relax. For millennials, our computer screens have quickly become more important than our televisions. But what I didn’t expect was that live video streaming would also turn Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry upside down.
If my experience with Mortal Kombat The trailer didn’t make it clear enough, and the video was an Internet disaster in the ’90s. Most web surfers (as we knew them at the time) were stuck with extremely slow modems and similarly unimpressive desktop systems. But in reality, the problem goes back to handling video on computers.
Apple’s Quicktime format has made the Mac the ideal platform for multimedia creators, and with its Hypercard software for creating interactive multimedia databases, it has led to mysterious And the obsession with multimedia educational software. Personal computers were based on MPEG-1, which debuted in 1993 and was primarily intended for VCDs and some digital TV providers. The problem with both formats was space: hard drives were small and expensive at the time, making CDs the main choice for accessing any type of video on your computer. If your computer only has a 500MB hard drive, a thin disk that can store 650MB sounds like magic.
But this also meant that video had no place in the early Internet. RealPlayer was the first real stab at offering streaming video and audio over the Internet — and while it was better than waiting 20 minutes to download a huge file, it was still difficult to actually stream media when you were tied to a dial-up modem. I remember seeing buffering alerts more than any real RealPlayer content. It took widespread broadband Internet access and one special application from Adobe to make web video truly viable.
Although we may curse its name today, it’s useful to remember how important Macromedia Flash was on the web in the early 2000s. (We’ve been around long enough to cover Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia in 2005!) Its support for vector graphics, stylized text, and simple games has breathed new life into the Internet, and allowed almost anyone to create that content. HTML was not enough. Ask any teenager or twenty-something who was online at the time, and they can probably still read most of them the end of the world By heart.
With Flash MX 6 released in 2002, Macromedia added support for Sorenson’s Spark video codec, which opened the floodgates to online video. (It was eventually replaced in 2005 by On2’s VP6 codec Acquired by Google in 2009.) Macromedia video looked decent, loaded quickly and was supported on every browser that had the Flash plug-in, making it an ideal player choice for video sites.
The adult entertainment industry moved to Flash video first, as you’d expect. Porn sites have also relied on technology to secure purchased videos and entice viewers to go to other sites with interactive ads. But it was YouTube (and to a lesser extent Vimeo) that showed everyday users what was possible with online video. After its launch in February 2005, YouTube has grown very quickly It serves 100 million videos daily By July 2006, it made up 60 percent of all online videos at the time. It’s no wonder Google was quick to acquire the company for $1.65 billion later that year (arguably the smartest purchase the search giant has ever made).
After YouTube’s meteoric rise, it wasn’t too surprising to see Netflix announce its Watch Now streaming service in 2007, which also relied on Flash for video. At $17.99 a month for 18 hours of video, with a library of just 1,000 titles, Netflix’s streaming offering didn’t initially pose much of a threat to Blockbuster, premium cable channels, or movie theaters. But the company wisely expanded Watch Now to all Netflix subscribers in 2008 and removed any viewing cap: and so the Netflix wave was born.
It’s 2007, and I’m trying to watch a video on the Internet. In my apartment after college, I connected my desktop computer to an early-era Philips HDTV (720p), and suddenly, I had access to thousands of movies, instantly watchable over a semi-decent cable connection. I didn’t need to worry about seeding torrents or collecting Usenet files (things I’d only heard about from dirty hackers, you see). I didn’t have to stress about any late fees to Blockbuster. The movies were on the TV, waiting for me to watch them. It was a digital media fanatics dream: legal content available at the touch of a button. What a concept!
Little did I know then that the concept of Watch Now would basically take over the world. Netflix initially wanted to create devices to make the service easier to access, but that idea ended up being scrapped, and Roku was born. The company’s streaming efforts also spurred the creation of Hulu, which was announced in late 2007 as a joint offering between NBCUniversal and News Corp. To present its television programs via the Internet. Disney later joined, giving Hulu the full power of all the major streaming TV networks. Instead of an old library of old movies, Hulu lets you watch new shows online the day after they air. Again, what a concept!
It appears that Amazon was actually ahead of Netflix’s streaming party. Amazon Unbox launched in 2006, allowing you to watch videos while downloading them to your computer. It was renamed to Amazon Video On Demand in 2008 (a better name, which actually describes what it did), and then became Amazon Instant Video in 2011, when it was linked to a premium Prime membership.
As the live video streaming world exploded, Flash’s reputation continued to decline. By the mid-2000s, it was widely recognized as a notoriously buggy program, software so insecure that it could lead to your computer being infected with malware. (I was working in IT at the time, and the vast majority of problems I encountered on Windows PCs stemmed entirely from Flash.) When the iPhone launched without Flash support in 2007, it was clear that the end was near . YouTube and other video sites moved to HTML5 video players at that point, and it became the standard by 2015.
By the early 2010s, YouTube and Amazon were not only happy to license content from Hollywood, they wanted some of the action themselves. Thus began the original programming boom, which began with mostly forgotten shows (anyone remembers the Netflix series Lilyhammer Or Amazon Alpha house? Hemlock Grove? They were there, I swear!)
But then he came House of cards In 2013, a Netflix original series created by the playwright Beau Willimon, was produced (and partly directed) by acclaimed director David Fincher and starring Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey (before he was revealed to be a monster). It had all the ingredients of an outstanding TV show, and thanks to Fincher’s skillful direction, it looked like something that could be a perfect fit on HBO. More importantly for Netflix, it has picked up some serious awards, earning nine Emmy nominations in 2013 and winning three statues.
By that point, we could watch streaming video in many more places than in a web browser on our computer. You can pull up almost anything on your phone and stream it via 4G LTE, or use the apps built into your smart TV to keep up with what’s new. SNL On Hulu. Your Xbox can also serve as the centerpiece of your home entertainment system. If you want the best streaming experience possible, you can choose an Apple TV or a Roku device. You can start a show on your phone while sitting at the box, then continue it seamlessly when you return to your TV. This was certainly a milestone for humanity, although I’m troubled that it was actually a net gain for our species.
Instant video streaming. Original TV shows and movies. This has been the basic formula that has led so many companies to offer their own streaming solutions over the past decade. In the blink of an eye, we had HBO Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, Peacock, and Paramount+. There’s AMC+, backed almost entirely by the unlimited promise walking dead Offers. Stars streaming service. There are countless other companies trying to act as Netflix for specific niches, like Shudder for horror movies, Crime Channel for cinephiles, and Britbox for the murder mystery crowd.
And let’s not forget the wildest and craziest streaming swing: Quibi. This was Dreamworks mastermind Jeffrey Katzenberg, who charged nearly $2 billion to launch mobile video. Somehow, he and his buddies thought people would pay $5 a month for the privilege of watching videos on their phones, even though YouTube was available for free.
Every entertainment company believes it can be as successful as Disney, which has an extensive and beloved catalog of content as well as complete control over the Lucasfilm and Marvel properties. But, realistically, there aren’t enough eyeballs and consumers wanting every streaming service to succeed. Some will die out completely, while others will bring their content to Netflix and more popular services (like what Paramount is doing with… Star Trek miracle). there Early rumors already From Comcast (parent company of NBCUniversal) and Paramount are considering some sort of union between Peacock and Paramount+.
Online video was supposed to save us from the tyranny of expensive and chaotic cable bills, and as chaotic as the arena is today, that’s still mostly true. Of course, if you really want to subscribe to most of the major streaming services, you’ll end up paying a chunk of change. But hey, at least you can cancel at will, and you can still choose precisely what you pay for. Never cable.
It’s 2024, and I’m trying to watch a video online. I slid on an Apple Vision Pro, a device that looks like it could have served as a prop Matrix. I run Safari in a 150-inch window perched above my living room and watch Mortal Kombat Trailer on YouTube. This whole process takes 10 seconds. I never had the opportunity to see the trailer or the original film in a theater. But thanks to the Internet (and expensive Apple headphones), I can replicate the experience.
Maybe that’s why, no matter how complex and expensive video streaming services become, I’ll always think: At least this is better than watching this thing over dial-up.
For celebration Engadget’s 20th anniversarywe take a look at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.
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