Birth of Web Casting
Three major mediums helped to give birth to web casting as a form of broadcasting. Radio, television and cable. Radio became a mass media tool in the 1920’s and was a significant part of the presidential elections. Radio was one of the main tools to broadcast the election results. Television made its debut in 1939 and allowed owners of TV sets to watch programs that were broadcast via airwaves. Six years later there would be over 10,000 sets in the U.S. and by 1957 75% of all American households contained a TV set. Cable, another form of broadcasting, used a closed wired path to present higher quality (audio/visual) programming to subscribers. By 1952 there were 14,000 cable subscribers and by 1962 that number had grown ton 850,000.
20 Years to Mature
Since the inception of radio, the collective ‘we’ have learned that it takes roughly 20 years for technology to grow from a start-up concept to a level where it becomes commercially viable. Streaming media, the next iteration of broadcasting, is the “new” mass medium (according to Steve Mack).
Service as a Commodity
Streaming media is becoming a commodity. Providers are seeing a decrease in the cost of bandwidth and license fees. And they’re in constant competition with other providers. The audience is often using more than one application to watch streaming content and more importantly, the audience is getting used to watching streaming content on the Internet. Lastly, people are discovering and learning how to find content that they want to watch (Google Video).
Technology Fact – Streaming Media Players
The leading streaming media players are owned and developed by Microsoft, Apple and Real Networks. It is commonly thought that all three are installed on most computers (although in my opinion this is completely inaccurate). Windows Media Player (WMP) is the most commonly installed player – with roughly 90% of streaming media user saturation. What differentiates WMP from Real and QuickTime is its original purpose. That is, WMP was purposely designed to play many types of content. The Real Player (and Real Networks) has focused on content delivery and Apple’s QuickTime was originally intended for CD and DVD-Rom authoring.
Further Fact - Google Video
Google Video (found at http://video.google.com) was designed as part of Google’s mission to, “organize the world’s information.” Google video enables users to search through an archive of television content. With the search terms one enters, Google searches the closed captioning and text descriptions of all the videos in the archive and display the appropriate results.