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Streaming Audio 10 Years Old
SlimySlimy writes "This month, streaming audio turns 10. Though first introduced by Real, streaming multimedia is so commonplace today it's hard to believe that it didn't even exist 10 years ago. In line with one of their previous press releases, RealNetworks has released a mysterious website and letter from CEO Rob Glaser celebrating 10 years of Internet streaming audio, as well as announcing a yet-to-be-revealed 'revolution' in digital media. 'On April 26, we are changing the rules of the Internet again, and digital music will never be the same.' Here is their press release from 1995 (when they were still Progressive Networks) announcing the first streaming Internet multimedia."
It's some sort of two-wheeled motorized single passenger vehicle. Oh wait...
Streaming video still buffering...
You can't take the sky from me...
First Po
[buffering 36%]
Am I the only one who isn't impressed with the state of streaming media these days? I think the current RealOne player is garbage. At least the original RealAudio wasn't nearly as bad, but it still consumed a lot of RAM and CPU cycles on my 68040.
At least VoIP and video conferencing have taken off and work quite well.
What are some of the better one-way, RealOne-like streaming formats these days?
In Win95, Real Player came as standard and had no spyware or data monitoring capabilities at all, it played ra and ram files and thats all it needed to do, tip for budding software companies in there somewhere iam sure
I despise RealPlayer.
So wait.. do we hate Real or not ?
Seriously, isn't Streaming Audio/Video just another solution searching for a problem that isn't there? Why should I use Streaming Media and suffer from bad quality, have to disable my other uses of my connection, risk having to wait for re-buffering,... when I can just download the same content in a proper format and use fast forward and rewind it, pause it,... in any way I like while watching it full screen in good quality?
Linux is not Windows
Buffering
Wouldn't MBONE count as streaming multimedia? It predates that by three years.
I do understand that there is enormous amounts of research and new technology poured into streaming media, but I still think to end-users (and myself), streaming is still a disappointing technology. Right now, with windows media and real, it often times is a crap shoot if the media will be there when you're watching it, leading to pauses and the infamous buffering problems. Real and Windows Media are sketchy programs that seem more interested in an attractive interface than ensuring the media looks good. Sure, we can go back and forth about if more people had broadband why it would be better, but right now the crappy resolution, encoding artifacts, and sub-par audio on many streams is unacceptable/unusable.
The best streaming I have seen is simple net-radio MPEG streams (or ogg), or apple quicktime. Apple trailers, though they take longer to buffer being such large files, tend to "guess" when to play it more accurately and are encoded like a professional video should look.
What I simply do not understand is why more websites, if they're pushing the same amount of bits either way, don't offer the complete file for download. I know that sometimes it is streamed to prevent copying, but more often than not, streamed media is not stuff that one would not want copied (being public an all). It may even reduce strain on the server with re-viewings done locally. I think users would be much happier to wait a minute longer if they get a high-quality video/audio file and they know won't stop half way.
It's a cool idea, but even after 10 years, its got a way to go.
How exactly are they defining "streaming audio"? Cuseeme was developed back in '93. I would consider that streaming media, and it's 12 years old.
I still remember playing with cuseeme in the computer lab at school. The connection was painfully slow, but it was really cool to see the humble origins of this technology.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
To be truthful, the first stream wasn't in 1996. It was way back in 1994, when WXYC started streaming using CuSeeMe. WREK (Georgia Tech's student radio) also started streaming with their own in-house software the same day WXYC went live, but it was not officially advertised until a later date.
More information at: http://wxyc.org/about/first/ and http://www.wrek.org/wreknet-first.html.
-R
They introduced it, they were doing it over 28kbps modems (which is probably where all the buffering lines come from ...
No. I have DSL. If I go try to watch, say, the Daily Show on Real or WMP, I expect that about half the time I'll have pauses or drops in quality or whatever because of connection issues. If I go to watch, say, a movie trailer in Quicktime, it downloads as fast as possible, shows me how much is downloaded, lets me start when I think I'll be able to see the whole thing, and lets me pause and jump around within everything already loaded without lag if I want to see something again or wait until the rest is loaded.
All of the cracks about Real come because the model of only giving you the data *right* when you need it is simply inferior to the model of giving you all the data at once. It's another example of rights holders crippling their own damn product in a hopeless attempt to prevent you from downloading it and showing it to your friends.
If web sites are using realtime streaming to show live content, then fair enough -- I don't blame Real if the connection gets slow. If they're using realtime streaming to show short pre-recorded clips that could easily fit in a RAM buffer, then they deserve ridicule for doing it, and Real deserves ridicule for encouraging it.
I see a Press Release flame war ensuing, touting the million or so subscribers that Real claims to have vs whatever million number of songs iTMS has served up.
Also, Real might be launching some new digital music service to take the steam out of Jobs's crowing over his pet project.
Just a thought.
"Back in June 1993 when HTML was more common in alphabet soup and the MBone, or the Multicast Backbone, was another technical novelty, STD was the first band to perform live on the Internet."
Sorry to piss on the parade here, but XFM, then Alices Resturant, were streaming on the web in 1992
13 years ago.
http://www.xfmdublin.com/
Now, who the hell *listened* to them, I dunno; as I was unable to get a decent net connection in this city till 2004..
I also doubt they were the first, but it proves WXYC *weren't* the first.
At the time that this was released, I was working on a project for streaming audio and video over fibre networks for a Imperial College in London (which is Britains top tech university). I downloaded the real player client and reverse engineered the protocol. To test it, I also downloaded a REM track off the net in .mp2 format. Yes, mp2 not mp3. This probably made me one of the first illegal music downloaders on the net. I wrote streaming software for DEC Alpha unix boxes and got thoroughly sick of hearing "Losing my religion" over and over and over again.
Back in 2004 there was this little noticed press release on their website: REALNETWORKS MERGES REALPLAYER AND MUSIC SERVICES TEAMS INTO SINGLE BUSINESS UNIT. I bet what they're announcing tomorrow is the fruits of their labor, a single program that combines the single-track buy idea with the subscription music idea, into one program and hopefully does it well. Napster does it now, but their subscription program has so many different restrictions on it it's really annoying (eg "buy track only" or "buy album only" and such).
Obviously the "digital music revolution" thing is a lot of hype, but a combined program would be far more effective than what they've got now, so long as it works well and isn't bloated to hell. Also, it'd be nice if they took this opportunity to upgrade the audio quality on the Rhapsody stream files to something like 160 or 192 AAC/RA10 instead of the 128WMA they use right now (the actual pay per track music store uses 192 AAC)
I used streaming audio over IP in 1992. But 2005 - 1992 > 10. What's wrong here??
Streaming audio has been around a LOT, LOT longer than ten years. Commercial streaming audio, maybe. But the idea -- and mature, working implementations -- have been around for far longer.
Anyone else here use Speak Freely on NeXStep? I still fondly remember being the weirdo in the lab who was "talking to his computer" -- actually, talking to a guy in a different city over voice over IP. That was in 1994, and it even had support for encryption. Not to mention all of the work on MBONE.
Other streaming audio apps existed long before that, too.