I remember as recently as ~2010, there were still a lot of physical video stores. netflix didn’t split off their DVD by mail service from streaming until 2012.
However my parents had broadband back in the late 90s. I think I had broadband ever since. And my parents were in a very rural area.
Netflix says it takes 0.3GB per hour to stream in low quality, 0.7GB to stream in standard quality. 3GB/hr for high definition. Those are speeds going from 0.6-6Mbps. Those are speeds that were available 20 years ago.
So why did it take so long for streaming to catch on? I remember not really switching to all streaming until around 2011 or so. Before that the quality of shows was so bad and in person DVD rentals were still worth it.
So what took so long? Is it the computer processing speed necessary to stream that wasn’t fast enough? It sounds like (at least for me) broadband speeds were in place for 15 years before streaming really caught on.
I am to this day often disappointed at the selections on Netflix and Amazon streaming services. I miss the selection at the video store (with same day service) or DVD by mail. Greedy studio copyright dweebs - there is no reason I shouldn’t be able to watch, say, the 1970s Murder on the Orient Express just because a remake came out.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
There’s rural, very rural, and very, very rural. The only way you can get affordable Internet service in 20% of my county in 2019 is with dialup. 70% (geographically) doesn’t have cable, and wireless services are very expensive and relatively slow (compared to cable). And the only cable company says they have no plans to expand, ever.
“What do you do if you want to watch a video?”
“We don’t watch videos online. We just read email.”
Where was 6 meg service available 20 years ago? At the turn of the century, I had 1.5 meg service in the suburbs of San Francisco, and that was the best available to mere mortals. By Netflix’ numbers, I might have been able to get standard def streaming on a good clear sunny day with no wind or rain to sneak into the phone lines and degrade the DSL signals.
It was simpler to just rent a DVD from Blockbuster or Netflix and get HD video.
In 2003 I started out with 750 kilobits per second, and after a while migrated to the top tier 1.5 megabits. Now, the same company (Charter) is at 200 megabits in my area, but my neighbor a few hundred feet away from me is “too far” from the service and Charter refuses to install even with degraded speed. (She has a satellite plan with only 10 GB per month at full speed from 8 AM to 2 AM, 15 GB from 2 AM to 8 AM, and after that is used speed is throttled to around 1 megabit for the rest of the month.)
Also, you have to look at the codecs used to get the compression necessary. Back when DVD first came out I had to use a decoder card because creaky old MPEG 2 was too computationally-intensive for the x86 CPUs of the time to decode in realtime. (After CSS was cracked it would take my computer around 24 hours to convert a single movie from MPEG 2 to DiVX.) More modern codecs like h.264 and h.265 are much more demanding than MPEG 2. So it took a long time for mainstream CPUs to be able to handle decoding the video streams. A PC from 20 years ago would probably decode h.265 at what, maybe one frame every few minutes?
There is no reason you can’t watch it. Because you can stream it from Amazon Prime right now. Netflix and Amazon individually have far greater selections than you could ever get at even the biggest brick and mortar store back in the day. And with right this instant service, not just same day.
Yeah, my internet connection is roughly Dixie Cups on a rotten string. And then the damn kid uses it all up on the first day of the cycle. Ain’t never gone be a thing here.
Well I work for one of the top 20 carriers in the world so have little expertise in this area.
1: Rights issues were tied up with the cable TV stations
2: Broadband has been around since 2000 but the underlying carrier infrastructure was not up to scratch yet
3: Cloud computing is now as scale to deliver millions of broadcasts (AWS etc have been big drivers)
4: In Australia all the content was owned by our 6 free to air channels and Foxtel. This was the key that Netflix etc needed to crack, football, GOT etc.
5: Data limits on Broadband (ADSL & Cable) was a major concern, now we have unlimited plans all good to stream.
Netflix knew these things and played the long game, very well done to them.
Those speeds were barely available to the average US customer back then. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, 2.5% of the US population had broadband in 2000. An FCC report that same year said a total of 2.8 million households had an internet speed above 200 kbps. Not exactly much of a market to sell online video to.
that and the mail order dvd business was still going strong and PPV was still a thing …… What got people used to streaming was you tube… when that became popular is when people finally decided to go for cable and dsl (well file sharing things like napster and online games and massive dvd and movie pirating helped too )
We were the one first places to get cable and dsl and they were the price of an entire phone/cable bill by themselves in the beginning so the mindset was "im just chatting and e-mailing 56.6k was sufficient
it wasn’t until about 05 when they started the viop for the phone tv and cable modems bundles did it take off and I know a lot of people that have cable internet solely because of things like steam and gog and world of Warcraft …….
Charter (now Spectrum) is the same (and only) cable company in my area. I find it interesting that after a spurt in the 1980-1990’s to wire up the most-profitable neighborhoods, they have absolutely halted further buildout beyond the core areas. It almost looks like they think there is no future in cable. I wonder if Charter plans a big wireless push?
Come to think of it, Charter has expanded their coverage very little. The original buildout was by smaller predecessors that they bought out. After the buyout, nearly all expansion stopped and all quotes for extending lines even a short distance were outrageous. Hmmm…quite a consumer-hostile business plan, no?
Hard drives and data storage was more expensive back then as well. I’m wondering if that plays a role. The videos have to be hosted somewhere, and that isn’t free.
I can always find something to stream that I want to watch, but in my experience it’s almost never the flick I first thought of when I started the streaming app. Brick & mortar stores were better in that way, although not perfect. Mail services were much better, even if it took a couple of days to get the video.
One of the promises of streaming was you could see any movie ever made. Even if you add the qualifiers that were hidden by marketers, we’ve got a ways to go.
OTOH, binge watching series is great, and the marketplace of new series makes this TV’s platinum age.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Yep. I have some early experience with broadband, too. The very first cable broadband service in North America was run as a pilot project here in southern Ontario starting in November, 1995. It became a commercial service in limited areas sometime just before 2000, I believe, at which point I was one of the first to sign up. I was going to say it was 3 Mbps but I think that came later, as speeds were incrementally upgraded.
But here’s the thing. Those early broadband systems, whether cable or DSL, were only available in limited areas, the actual speeds were often much lower than the theoretical speeds advertised, and they were often unreliable as hell. In fact being an early adopter of cable broadband was downright painful, and it didn’t become reliable until the first-generation modems were replaced with what I believe were the first DOCSIS 2.0 compliant modems. “Reliable” means that at least there weren’t frequent outages, but speeds were still iffy for many years and often variable and jittery and significantly below the advertised speeds, with service techs compulsively pointing out the words “up to” in the advertised specs.
This was not the kind of infrastructure you would want any streaming business to bet its business on. Netflix was smart to see the long-term potential, but also smart not to launch into it too early. They would have had nothing but complaints from customers with videos freezing and jittering. Today I can check my Internet speeds and they are typically a solid straight line at the maximum speed I’m supposed to have. That wouldn’t have been the case even a handful of years ago. The infrastructure technology has advanced in leaps and bounds, and it’s easy to forget how slow and flaky it once was.
That would have been very unusual. I worked for a global internet provider in the late 90s and portions of their backbone were still T1s. (By about 2000 they had been upgraded to T3s). Probably half the offices we brought on as customers were using dial up.
Hear, hear. Yet many videos are still unavailable, and every so often Netflix runs an ad campaign urging you to watch something right away, because they will be removing it soon. What’s up with that? It can’t be the cost of storage!