STID1103 COMPUTER APPLICATION IN MANAGEMENT
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 History of Streaming Media
In the early 1920s, George O. Squier was granted patents for a system for the transmission
and distribution of signals over electrical lines which was the technical basis for what later
became Muzak, a technology streaming continuous music to commercial customers
without the use of radio.
Attempts to display media on computers date back to the earliest days of computing in the
mid-20th century. However, little progress was made for several decades, primarily due to
the high cost and limited capabilities of computer hardware. From the late 1980s through
the 1990s, consumer-grade personal computers became powerful enough to display
various media. The primary technical issues related to streaming were: having enough
CPU power and bus bandwidth to support the required data rates and creating low-latency
interrupt paths in the operating system to prevent buffer under run.
However, computer networks were still limited, and media were usually delivered over
non-streaming channels, such as by downloading a digital file from a remote server and
then saving it to a local drive on the end user’s computer or storing it as a digital file and
playing it back from CD-ROMs.
1.2 New Technologies
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Internet users saw:
· greater network bandwidth, especially in the last mile
· increased access to networks, especially the Internet
· use of standard protocols and formats, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML
· Commercialization of the Internet.
“Severe Tire Damage” was the first band to perform live on the Internet. On June 24, 1993,
the band was playing a gig at Xerox PARC while elsewhere in the building, scientists were
discussing new technology (the Mbone) for broadcasting on the Internet using
multicasting. As proof of their technology, the band was broadcast and could be seen live
in Australia and elsewhere.
The first symphonic concert on the internet took place at the Paramount Theater in Seattle,
Washington on November 10, 1995.The concert was a collaboration between The Seattle
Symphony and various guest musicians such as Slash (Guns ‘n Roses, Velvet Revolver),
Matt Cameron (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam), and Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees).
When Word Magazine launched in 1995, they featured the first-ever streaming soundtracks
on the Internet. Using local downtown musicians the first music stream was “Big Wheel”
by Karthik Swaminathan and the second being “When We Were Poor” by Karthik
Swaminathan with Marc Ribot and Christine Bard.
On 5 September 1995, ESPN Sports Zone streamed a live radio broadcast of a baseball
game between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees to thousands of its
subscribers worldwide using cutting-edge technology developed by a Seattle-based startup
company named Progressive Networks. It was the world’s first live streaming event. A few
years later the company would change its name to Real Networks and before long it would
find itself embroiled in a bitter technological and legal war with Microsoft for domination
of a brand new technology market – streaming media. Real Networks was also a pioneer in
the streaming media markets.
Though the prospect of streaming media over the internet had always excited technology
nerds and CEOs alike, streaming media’s childhood years were primarily marred by
pragmatic problems such as how to successfully stream watchable video over 56k modem
lines. Microsoft emerged from the war with Real Networks as a winner due to its Windows
Media technologies, but soon found itself unable to capitalize on the victory. While the
Redmond-based US company frittered away its advantage, Macromedia (later acquired by
Adobe Systems) slowly but surely eroded Windows Media’s market share in the mid-2000s
in favor of its increasingly popular Flash Player. Flash shook up the streaming media
industry by seamlessly marrying interactivity, Web 2.0 and streaming media for the first
time. A new era in streaming media had arrived, but the old problems still remained –
bandwidth, scalability and reach.
In the early days of streaming media — the mid-to-late 1990s — watching videos and
listening to music online wasn’t always fun. It was a little like driving in stop-and-go
traffic during a heavy rain. If you had a slow computer or a dial-up Internet connection,
you could spend more time staring at the word “buffering” on a status bar than watching
videos or listening to songs. On top of that, everything was choppy, pixilated and hard to
see.
Streaming video and audio have come a long way since then. According to Bridge Ratings,
57 million people listen to Internet radio every week. In 2006, people watched more than a
million streaming videos a day on YouTube [source: Reuters]. The same year, television
network ABC started streaming its most popular TV shows over the Web. People who
missed an episode of shows like “Lost” or “Grey’s Anatomy” could catch up on the entire
thing online — legally and for free.
The success of streaming media is pretty recent, but the idea behind it has been around as
long as people have. When someone talks to you, information travels toward you in the
form of a sound wave. Your ears and brain decode this information, allowing you to
understand it. This is also what happens when you watch TV or listen to the radio.
Information travels to an electronic device in the form of a cable signal, a satellite signal or
radio waves. The device decodes and displays the signal.
In streaming video and audio, the traveling information is a stream of data from a server.
The decoder is a stand-alone player or a plugin that works as part of a Web browser. The
server, information stream and decoder work together to let people watch live or
prerecorded broadcasts.
1.3 Streaming Media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user
while being delivered by a provider. Its verb form, “to stream”, refers to the process of
delivering media in this manner; the term refers to the delivery method of the medium
rather than the medium itself.
A client media player can begin playing the data (such as a movie) before the entire file
has been transmitted. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies
specifically to telecommunications networks, as most other delivery systems are either
inherently streaming such as radio, television) or inherently non-streaming for instance
books, video cassettes, audio CDs. For example, in the 1930s, elevator music was among
the earliest popularly available streaming media; nowadays Internet television is a
common form of streamed media. The term ‘streaming media” can apply to media other
than video and audio such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which
are all considered ‘streaming text”. The term ‘streaming” was first used in the early 1990s
as a better description for video on demand on IP networks; at the time such video was
usually referred to as ‘store and forward video”, which was misleading nomenclature.
Live streaming, which refers to content delivered live over the Internet, requires a camera
for the media, an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery
network to distribute and deliver the content.
1.4 Background of Streaming Media
Internet streaming media changed the Web as we knew it– changed it from a static text-
and graphics-based medium into a multimedia experience populated by sound and moving
pictures. Now streaming media is poised to become the de facto global media broadcasting
and distribution standard, incorporating all other media, including television, radio, and
film. The low cost, convenience, worldwide reach, and technical simplicity of using one
global communications standard makes web broadcasting irresistible to media publishers,
broadcasters, corporations, and individuals. Businesses and individuals once denied access
to such powerful means of communication are now using the Web to connect with people
all over the world.
The remarkable technology that allows a web site visitor to click on a button and seconds
later listen to a sporting event, tradeshow keynote, or CD-quality music is the result of a
rather simple but powerful technical innovation–streaming media. Streaming works by
first compressing a digital audio file and then breaking it into small packets, which are
sent, one after another, over the Internet. When the packets reach their destination (the
requesting user), they are decompressed and reassembled into a form that can be played by
the user’s system. To maintain the illusion of seamless play, the packets are “buffered” so a
number of them are downloaded to the user’s machine before playback. As those buffered
or preloaded packets play, more packets are being downloaded and queued up for
playback. However, when the stream of packets gets too slow (due to network congestion),
the client audio player has nothing to play, and you get the all-too-familiar drop-out that
every user has encountered.
Streaming media (video/ audio) through the internet is a huge trend, with many
applications. It has open up a doorway to new online services like video sharing, online
TV, VOIP, video conferencing, video banners, online walkthrough and so many more. It
has brought online communication to a whole new level, and even more so this technology
