Streaming media was with us for longer than most of us would’ve thought. The first attempts at making online streaming mainstream were made by RealNetworks – their first online transmission was that of a baseball game that took place in 1995. This one was an audio transmission only, of course – they didn’t introduce video until 1997. From the relatively low-resolution audio and video offered by RealMedia, streaming has evolved to offer not just better quality but also more interaction. Today, streaming is not limited to media but it ventures into interaction as well, from running games in the cloud to playing live games at the best Thai casino you can find.
The past
RealMedia were the pioneers of media streaming – but they weren’t the only company to develop the technology. Microsoft’s own ActiveMovie technology launched in 1995 has a proprietary format that later evolved into Windows Media Player’s built-in streaming feature. Apple followed with its own QuickTime format and software suite. These three formats were all widely adopted by websites.
Unfortunately, each of these formats relied on its own plugins that internet users had to download and install – sometimes all three of them. This was, as you might recall, frustrating.
This is why the emergence of Adobe Flash as a unified video streaming platform was seen as a saviour. The Flash-based video became the new norm, especially after the launch of YouTube – and its acquisition by Google.
Unfortunately for Adobe, the reight of Flash Video was not long-lived. It lived to see the emergence of the first iPhone but it was ultimately slain by it, thanks to Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash, an open letter published in 2010. In it, Apple’s marketing guru pointed out that Flash consumes too much power, is prone to crashes, and is unsecure – and it’s not something he’d like to see on the devices sold by the company he leads. Instead, he promoted the emerging HTML5 format that is open, lightweight, and most importantly cross-platform that can run on any operating system that uses a compatible web browser.
In a relatively short time, the leading video streaming services abandoned Flash Video in favour of HTML5. Ultimately, the Adobe Flash platform went EOL at the end of 2020.
The present
Today, streaming is everywhere. Instead of downloading songs or listening to FM radio, most of us stream both from the internet. We no longer watch TV, we stream our favourite movies and TV shows online. We run video games on computers in the cloud, streaming the stream output to our own. Anyone with a smartphone and an account on social media can stream a live video feed from anywhere with an internet connection – it’s as easy as it was to send a text message in the 1990s.
And we are witnessing a “streaming war” fought by big names in many areas. When it comes to music, we have players like Spotify, YouTube Music, Tidal, and Deezer. When it comes to video, we have massive media empires like Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Amazon, and many smaller players fighting for their slice of the pie.
Streaming is increasingly dominating our media consumption, no matter if it’s audio, video or gaming.
The future
Where will we go from here?
Streaming has become the way to go for media companies. And media companies are embracing it big time – unfortunately, most of them are doing so in the US only. But things are changing: streaming services “personalized” to the tastes of viewers in various regions are being planned as we speak – take SkyShowtime, for example, a planned service that’s expected to be launched by Comcast, the company behind Sky, Showtime, and NBCUniversal, with European audiences in mind.
In time, broadcast TV channels will lose more and more of their viewers, as people transition to streaming. At the same time, the smaller streaming services will be slowly engulfed by the big names, consolidating the market further.
Technologically speaking, we are not expecting many changes in the near future. 5G will allow more users to follow streams in higher resolution, with higher-quality sound, but that’s about what we can expect to see improved in the short term.
