• Steven Levy : Streaming celebrates its 25th birthday. Here’s how it all began
    https://link.wired.com/view/5cec29ba24c17c4c6465ed0bc0nqt.1f2j/12bb6811

    So it’s a good time to say happy birthday to streaming media, which just celebrated its 25th anniversary. Two and a half decades ago, a company called Progressive Networks (later called Real Networks) began using the internet to broadcast live and on-demand audio.

    I spoke with its CEO, Rob Glaser, this week about the origins of streaming internet media. Glaser, with whom I have become friendly over the years, told me that he began pursuing the idea after attending a board meeting for a new organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1993. During the gathering, he saw an early version of Mosaic, the first web browser truly capable of handling images. “A light bulb went off,” Glaser says. “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.”

    Glaser believed it was time for a commercial service. When he launched his on April 25, 1995, the first customers were ABC News and NPR; you could listen to news headlines or Morning Edition. It wasn’t the user-friendliest—you had to download his Real Audio app to your desktop and then hope it made a successful connection to the browser. At that point, it worked only on demand. But in September 1995, Progressive Networks began live streaming. Its first real-time broadcast was the audio of a major league baseball game—the Seattle Mariners versus the New York Yankees. (The Mariners won.The losing pitcher was Mariano Rivera, then a starter.) The few who listened from the beginning had to reboot around the seventh inning, as the buffers filled up after two and a half hours or so. By the end of that year, thousands of developers were using Real.

    Other companies began streaming video before Glaser’s, which introduced RealVideo in 1997. The internet at that point wasn’t robust enough to handle high-quality video, but those in the know understood that it was just a matter of time. “It was clear to me that this was going to be the way that everything is going to be delivered,” says Glaser, who gave a speech around then titled “The Internet as the Next Mass Medium.” That same year, Glaser had a conversation with an entrepreneur named Reed Hastings, who told him of his long-range plan to build a business by shipping physical DVDs to people, and then shift to streaming when the infrastructure could support it. That worked out well. Today, our strong internet supports not only entertainment but social programming from YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and others.

    #Histoire_numérique #Streaming