The Rocky History of Live Streaming, and What’s To Come
Humble Beginning
Live streaming across the Internet began on the evening of June 24, 1993, in (of course) Palo Alto, and more specifically on the roof of Xerox PARC. The event was a performance by the tech-savvy rock band Severe Tire Damage (hence the brilliant pun in this article’s title). Severe Tire Damage was at that time made up of one Apple engineer, two DSRC engineers and the chief technologist of Xerox PARC itself.
They were able to stream their performance using a new technology known as Multicast Backbone (Mbone). Mbone was created in the early 90s as a way of transmitting media data, primarily audio and video, across an Internet that was designed only to service email accounts and small requests. At that time, the Internet itself wasn’t equipped to handle such a flow of data, and so specialised hardware had to be utilised for Mbone. Mbone was the first widespread implementation of UDP connections, which should be a precursor to you of what’s to come in this article.
Mbone allowed for a method of communication that seems so native to us now. Instead of one user requesting one resource from one server (an…
