The Evolution of Online Video

Part One: Building the Road to the 'Zoo'

by Jennie Josephson

On April 23, 2005, "Me at the zoo" was the first video uploaded onto a new website called YouTube. This short clip of two elephants and a gangly kid helped boost the fledgling medium of online video into the entertainment stratosphere. Obamagirl, the Sneezing Panda, and other online luminaries exist thanks to the marriage of two 20th century innovations--computers and electronic mass media. Here's a quick look at these technologies got hitched.

Film, radio, and television each took a turn as the dominant electronic medium of the 20th century. All originally analog technologies, each delivered news and entertainment to the world; but all three evolved in a separate universe from a nifty number crunching device called the computer. Watch A History of Television video at https://www.digitaltips.org/video/tvHistory.asp

In the forties and fifties, some very smart people invented computers to handle the complex mathematics that could crack German encryption codes and put rockets into space. Although the earliest computers were analog, they quickly evolved into digital machines. The next step: how to get those machines to communicate over great distances.



From the late 1960's through the early 1990's, the computer research community developed the first online networks that ultimately led to today's internet. In 1977, the first wave of smaller, faster personal computers hit the market. When paired with a modem, these desktop sets allowed people outside the core research community to access early online networks. These people were called "computer hobbyists," back when owning a home computer seemed about as useful as a train set or a model ship.



It was the Usenet discussion groups of the eighties that first enabled large groups of to connect online. Usenet groups were also places to post files: computer programs, images, music, and, yes, porn. Other destinations such as The Well tried to create a more literate community; but this need to reach out and share was a driving force in the rapidly expanding virtual universe. Although these communities remained relatively small (compared to, say, people who watched "Dallas"), they provided a powerful, mostly unheeded lesson: regular people could entertain each other without help from a television network or film studio. Hmm…



In the eighties, individual computer networks adopted new protocols that allowed them to connect to each other, forming the first strands of the modern internet. In the early nineties, the World Wide Web and early browsers like Mosaic added images and sound to the online experience. The number of computers on the internet began to increase at a rapid pace.



So where was video in this brave new virtual world? It was on TV, in the VCR, and nowhere near your computer. Devices that could convert analog video into digital data were the expensive tools of professionals. And most home computers still lacked the hardware, processing power, and storage space to handle large video files.

Audio was far easier to manipulate. As early as 1973, researchers experimented with sending real-time audio over ARPANET (the proto-internet). By the nineties, audio was available in digital form, thanks to CD's, and easy to compress using mp3 technology. Soon, music files of dubious legality flooded the web. (But, um, you wouldn't know anything about that, right?)

The biggest problem for video was bandwidth. The fastest internet connections were only affordable for universities and businesses. At home, you likely used a 56Kbps or 14.4Kbps modem, which wheezed and groaned like an asthmatic on a Stairmaster. This made downloading even a small video file a time-consuming, frustrating, often futile act.

But as always, the internet research community was 'streaming' towards a solution. At the 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (the Jedi Council of the net), researchers conducted the first test of streaming audio when conference sessions were 'multicast' to 20 different sites on three continents. (Multicasting was a new method of delivering real time data to many computers at once without crashing the network).The audio test was a success, and video wasn't far behind. Watch this deeply wonky video from Cisco explaining multicasting.

At the July 1992 IETF meeting, researchers demonstrated a new video conferencing program that displayed real time audio and video of the participants. It was now technologically possible to send a constant stream of audio and video to a computer just in time for the user to experience it, eliminating the need to wait for a full download.

These developments led to the creation of the Multicast Backbone (MBONE), a virtual network that ran 'on top of' the regular internet, streaming audio and video. If you had the right hardware and something more powerful than that wheezy old modem, you could connect to the MBONE network and watch shuttle launches, listen to live music or videoconference with colleagues. In 1993, Severe Tire Damage became the first band to perform live on the Internet via MBONE, followed a year later by a little group called The Rolling Stones. And Carl Malamud launched the first internet radio station with a show called "Geek of the Week." Webcasting had arrived.

By the late nineties, the technology powering the MBONE network was absorbed by the internet, and the battle for streaming media dominance between QuickTime, RealPlayer, Flash, and Windows Media Player was well underway. Sites like AudioNet (later re-named broadcast.com) licensed traditional audio and video content (talk shows, concerts, college basketball) and streamed it live to subscribers. The web now provided the same news and entertainment that had only been available via traditional electronic media. A tentative courtship began.

In 1998, at the height of the dotcom boom, broadcast.com went public with the best opening-day gain of any company in Wall Street history to that point. A year later, founders Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban sold the site to Yahoo for more than five billion dollars in stock.



There were other video-centric sites jostling for viewers and venture capital in the late nineties. Each offered a motley brew of short-form content; the ill-fated Digital Entertainment Network spent big bucks producing original shows for web audiences before flaming out in 2000; iFilm featured short films and viral videos; and sites like AtomFilms actually paid contributors for their videos.

These new companies all shared one common feature: each determined what videos should be shown on their site, exercising the same editorial control as any newspaper, magazine, or television show. Sites like iFilm and AtomFilms were popular, but just slightly ahead of the widespread home broadband connections which might have delivered a larger audience.

By the time we 'survived' Y2K and the dotcom crash, home computers were faster, more powerful and video friendly; and digital camcorders and webcams were far more prevalent. Most important, the average web citizen could now afford a broadband internet connection--even if most were still using painful old dialup modems.

But it was the battle between the music industry and file sharing services like Napster that defined the first few years of this multimedia century. In 2001, Napster was forced to shut down and Apple released iTunes; new file sharing programs sprung up like mushrooms to keep the free (inconveniently illegal) music flowing. Sure, you could download a music video or movie trailer; but in this era, the persistent desire to share cool things with other fans was mostly a musical obsession. (And porn, always porn.)

Another sharing trend was blooming in early years of the new century; the use of online diaries and journals. Frequently updated, often personal, and politically passionate, these 'weblogs' generated an avalanche of what came to be known as "user-generated content." Just like earlier Usenet members, bloggers were arguing with, learning from and entertaining each other online. Not only were these scribes independent of traditional media outlets, but they were now actively influencing events in traditional media. Hmmm…

By 2005, the web was a thriving, opinionated, and profitable multimedia universe. But it took a couple of pachyderms at the zoo, and three guys who worked at PayPal, to make the rest of the world pay attention to the next major cyberspace obsession…You.

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