What is streaming and where did it come from?
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Streaming movies is something that has become second nature to many of us today, but for others, it’s just another piece of jargon that doesn’t mean anything. When you’re checking out the different deals from broadband providers in Ireland, you may be savvy enough to enquire whether the broadband speed they can offer you will be suitable for streaming movies, but do you know what you’re actually asking? Many of us don’t, we just assume it’s something we need. And if you want to use services like Netflix and others to watch a huge choice of movies, you’re right to assume that.
For the uninitiated, here’s the easy to understand explanation of what streaming is, along with a little bit of background of how we’ve got to where we are today with streaming movies, music and more online.
If you stream a programme or piece of music, you get to watch it in real time, rather than needing to download the file to your computer to watch when the download is complete. That’s the gist of it!
When you stream a live event you don’t end up with the file on your computer, you just tap into a continuous stream of data. For broadcasters, a real positive aspect of streaming compared with downloading is that is difficult to save streamed content and distribute it illegally.
So how did streaming develop?
The first event to be streamed was back in 1995 when ESPN SportsZone streamed the radio broadcast of a Seattle Mariners vs New York Yankees baseball game live to its subscribers. The company that did the streaming was Progressive Networks, which would soon be up against Microsoft to win the battle of leading in streaming technology over 56k modem lines. Microsoft may have beaten Progressive Networks but then had its market share eroded in the mid-2000s by Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe Systems) and its Flash Player.
Flash Player heralded a new era in streaming media but streaming was still slow at times because of the lack of available bandwidth. In 2007 a company called Move Networks changed the face of streaming with the introduction of HTTP-based adaptive streaming.
Move Networks’ technology was a game changer as it didn’t rely on proprietary streaming protocols or the vagaries of the bandwidths users could access. Instead it used the dominant HTTP protocol to stream the media in small chunks while the player application monitored download speeds and could request different sized chunks as it responded to the current network conditions. This was the first time ‘buffering’ became a part of streaming – where the PC stores a ‘buffer’ of data that has already been received. If there is internet congestion, the video isn’t interrupted as the buffer is there to fill the gap. If there’s no data left in the buffer, the video stops and displays a buffering message until the streaming catches up.
Move Networks led the way here, but was soon followed by other HTTP-based adaptive streaming options from Microsoft (Smooth Streaming) and Netflix introduced its Watch Instantly service in 2008. Apple followed in 2009, as did Adobe in 2010.
Over the years, streaming has become more and more sophisticated to the point that anyone can now stream music and movies as long as they have a decent broadband connection. The files that are encoded for streaming are highly compressed – this is so that they use a minimal amount of bandwidth.
If you’re planning on streaming a lot of media on your broadband connection, you first need to establish that you’ll have a decent connection speed. Ask a potential supplier to do a broadband speed test for you. You’ll also need to understand how much bandwidth allowance you have – often this is capped at a certain number of megabytes per month. Usually, the best option is to choose an unlimited download broadband deal so that you can be sure that you’ll always stay within your allowance. However, always double check the terms and conditions as some unlimited deals have fair usage policies and if you exceed this amount, you could find your bill is more than you expected at the end of the month!
