Another week? My, that was … excruciating. But the virus still lurks, so many of us will do it again next week. Meanwhile, here’s another edition of Plaintext.
For now, this weekly column is free for everyone to access. Soon, only WIRED subscribers will get Plaintext as a newsletter. You’ll get to keep reading it in your inbox by subscribing to WIRED (discounted 50%), and in the process getting all our amazing tech coverage in print and online.
The Plain View
What would our quarantines be like without streaming? Without the ability to hear, upon whim, any song we care to, or Fiona Apple’s new album, the minute it was available? Without leaping on recommendations for hidden TV gems to binge? (In 2020, every conversation with a friend begins 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 because we have a means of sending sound and image all over the world without friction.
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.”
There had been a few previous experiments in streaming media. In the early ’90s a visionary named Carl Malamud used the internet to distribute an audio interview show that he called Geek of the Week. Only those in high-powered computer centers could access it live. The first video milestone occurred in 1993, when a filmmaker named David Blair connected his VCR to a computer, encoded it to digital form, and beamed out his cult flick Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. It was monotone instead of color and ran at two frames a second instead of the standard 24. Even so, there were glitches, and the sound kept dropping out.