Video Streaming: How It Evolved To Be

How did video streaming come about Video streaming is but one aspect of streaming media that is expended and utilized by viewing it, by hearing it, or by reading it. Although streaming is more focus on the capability of the system of delivery that is used for the distribution of the contents. There came about a distinction since media then was either via streamed or non-streamed. Those inherently streamed were those coming from the radio and television while those that were inherently non-streamed were coming from video cassettes, books, and audio CDs.

Video streaming is the fusion of the two.

As early as the middle of 20th century, there were already attempts made that would have possibly enabled computers and computing to handle media. However as the computer hardware were not yet that sophisticated and the prohibitive cost in acquiring them deterred the progress for decades. It was possible to stream the media on to the computers as there were experiments done by academicians in the 1970s that proved its feasibility. The 80s decade brought about the advancement of computers in terms of capability and speed, thus, the computers developed the capacity to display the diverse media that are in the mainstream. However, it was not all sunny and roses as there were still technical difficulties being experienced in streaming.

Some of the technical complexities that were bugging that time were: issues with the power of the CPU and the bandwidth needed to fully support the essential data rates. There were also issues with the inability to create interrupt paths of low-latency that would inhibit the under-running of the buffer in the operating system. Since the networks of computers were nonetheless limited, and the media delivered were still using the traditional channels, i.e., non-streamed channels, these issues were not demanding immediate resolution.

In the 1990s, the issues in the 80s were less becoming a problem because of the following grounds: the bandwidth available for the network increased, due to the increased network bandwidth, access to the same also increased especially with the introduction of the internet, and there came about the standardization of formats and protocols i.e., HTML, TCP/IP, and HTTP, that made the network more accessible, and lastly, the utilization of the internet for commercial purposes. These developments in the networking side of the computers as well as the proliferation of powerful home-based computers as well as the development of software through operating systems that were capable to meet the requirements of streaming made streaming accessible and inexpensive, especially to the ordinary end-users.

So who uses streamed media A lot of ordinary internet users at one point or another have used streamed media. But there are a lot technologies behind the scenes at work before it gets in a website or in the internet. Basically, the old technology is still at work whereby audio and video recorders and cameras are put to work thereby creating the raw material. Editors, programmers, and other technical enthusiasts create these raw materials into something creative and it becomes a completed design. Most of these finished media get stored in the servers and the servers ensure that these are available when people need them. The clients then retrieve the media from the servers and the media is then presented to the end-user. The bottom line is that the clients and the servers store and keep the media in different file formats, then they send and collect the same in different stream formats.

How do the servers and clients communicate the media with each other This is done through computer network protocols that have been agreed upon. How is it done The servers turn the media into the file format agreed upon by encoding it in a stream that would be transmitted to the clients, while the clients then accept the stream transmission and begins the decoding so that it will be up for display in the web. Since the content is still large over multi-media, the costs for storage and its transmission are still prohibitive and so what is done is that the media is usually condensed and compressed in terms of streaming and storage to save on costs.