Tech

TV on the internet before YouTube

Kye Fox

— 1 min read

Just a little note to get this all in one place. This was prompted by my comment here:

On-demand was a thing before, but it was mediated through slow, glitchy cable and satellite boxes. There was also a thriving scene of RSS-delivered web TV shows.
  • The technology (RSS) that delivers podcasts can also deliver video
  • Most shows from the pre-YouTube era are gone, but at least one survives: This Week in Tech (TWiT). They still offer a provider chooser that lets you grab an RSS feed with a video container for the show. TWiT has grown into a whole network and I don't know if all their shows are offered this way.
  • Democracy Player (changed to Miro before development ended) was a popular way to watch and find these shows, though it came much later and in the same year Google bought YouTube.
  • There was also a thriving ecosystem of independent Flash-based video and interactive things with some of the big names being:
    • Newgrounds. You might remember the All Your Base meme, which is still on there
    • Homestar Runner. It's back from the abyss created by the death of Flash with modern web standards, though the actual videos are YouTube embeds.
    • Weebls Stuff. I don't know why we found this amusing. Weebl is still at it.

Of course, it doesn't start in the 2000s! A big meme back in the late 90s was Buffering....

Buffering...

Because Realplayer did that a lot if you didn't have a beefy enough machine for a long buffer or a connection that could fill the buffer. Allegedly people would vandalize the sign on their office with "Buffering..." stickers.

I'm sure I forgot things. Drop me an email and I'll see about adding it. Finding anything myself is hard these days because Google is useless, and the Wikipedia page on internet video was merged into streaming video and it skips right past the entire history of internet video before YouTube.

Read more