Another week? My, that was … agonizing. The infection still lurks, so numerous of us will do it once again next week. Here’s another edition of Plaintext.
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The Plain View
What would our quarantines resemble without streaming? Without the capability to hear, upon impulse, any song we care to, or Fiona Apple’s new album, the minute it was offered? Without leaping on recommendations for surprise TELEVISION gems to binge? (In 2020, every conversation with a pal starts with “Are you feeling OK?” and ends with “What have you been watching?”) Without the homegrown videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok? All of this is possible since we have a method of sending noise and image all over the world without friction.
So it’s a great time to say happy birthday to streaming media, which just celebrated its 25 th anniversary. 2 and a half decades earlier, a business called Progressive Networks (later called Genuine Networks) began utilizing the web to transmit live and on-demand audio.
I consulted with its CEO, Rob Glaser, today about the origins of streaming web media. Glaser, with whom I have actually ended up being friendly over the years, informed me that he started pursuing the concept after attending a board meeting for a brand-new organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation in1993 During the gathering, he saw an early variation of Mosaic, the very first web internet browser truly capable of dealing with images. “A light bulb went off,” Glaser states. “What if it could do the same for audio and video? Anybody could be a broadcaster, and anybody could hear it from anywhere in the world, anytime they wanted to.”
There had actually been a couple of previous experiments in streaming media. In the early ’90 s a visionary named Carl Malamud utilized the web to disperse an audio interview reveal that he called Geek of the Week Only those in high-powered computer centers could access it live. The first video turning point took place in 1993, when a filmmaker
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