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Bob Butler         COMA 4320         March 18, 2007

Multicasting

 A Technology that Almost Made a Difference

A brief history of Streaming Media

The idea of remotely transmitted broadcasts is as old as radio. When television entered the scene, people were eager to join in the fun. As the television began to deliver better pictures and with cable or satellite, a huge variety, Radio struggled for market share by increasing quality and tailoring itself for the short term broadcast. Why then would people care to use a computer to listen to radio broadcasts when they are of poor quality and video not possible at all?

Yet in the mid 1990’s Realplayer ® came on the scene with a program that allowed people to play snippets of audio right on the computer. A common misconception is that the Realplayer was designed for streaming media. It was not. It was designed to play a file from beginning to end. Unfortunately live streaming media has no beginning or end once it has begun. The founders of Realplayer were forward thinking enough to allow their program to tinkered with by outside designers.

It is not clear who actually found a way to trick the stock player into playing streaming media, however, a small company in Dallas, TX was coming on to the scene as this problem was solved. This company, AudioNet, was founded by two guys who wanted to find a way to listen to their beloved Hoosiers here in Dallas . Mark Cuban, already accomplished in the computing industry obtained permission to set up an encoding computer in the campus radio station which he connected via a Virtual Private Network to his loft in Deep Ellum. There, using Realplayer, he and Todd Wagner enjoyed the fruit of their labor. The answer to the question is that people will listen to a low quality broadcast when it is all that is available. 

Not long after this, it was suggested that a person could start a business replicating what Cuban had created. With this, AudioNet was born. Before long, there were about 300 radio stations being broadcast over the Internet. This was nice for people who worked in buildings with access to the Internet, but where a radio wave couldn’t reach. People could listen to a radio station a thousand miles away. Indeed one of the more notable statistics was the number of servicemen overseas who were ecstatic to listen to music from home.

Early Streaming Media

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