Design Template by Anonymous

What is Time Based Media?

Definition

Time based media is any type of media that has a duration. In most cases this refers to video and audio. This includes video without audio, video with audio, or just audio. Forms of audio and video streaming over a network have been available since the early 90’s.

The First Iteration of Media Streaming

The first iteration of what we would consider today to be “streaming” was introduced back in 1993 by a company called Xing Technologies. Its founder, Howard Gordan, introduced a system to stream MPEG-1 video files over a TCP/IP network. This coincided with the public release of the World Wide Web. This meant, that for the first time, it was possible to stream video over the internet.

Limitations of StreamWorks

StreamWorks, being the first implementation of this technology, had some fallbacks. While MPEG-1 was “Television Quality” at the time, it was difficult to actually get this data to transmit. It required a 200 Kilobit per second connection, which is ubiquitous now, but it was not back in 1993. In 1993, the average internet connection speed was 28.8K, or 28 kbps. This means that most internet connections were a little over 1/10th the required speed to stream MPEG-1 efficiently. This resulted in this technology being more common for use with local networks. It would be awhile before this technology was used by consumers, with the first customer facing implantation being used in on demand cable.