Dear Visitor & Vintage Computing Enthusiast,
You are about to experience live and on-demand audio and video the late '90s, when most of us still had dial-up modems. Before Apple Music, Spotify, or Pandora; before Limewire, Napster, and Gnutella; before Netflix, YouTube, and AppleTV; there was RealAudio and RealVideo.
During the month of March, there will be multiple live streams from various sources:
Server:
Seattle-based Progressive Networks was founded in 1994 by Rob Glaser. He had an idea for delivering intelligible audio over the Internet at the relatively low bitrates afforded by dial-up Interet. Progressive Networks' first RealAudio codecs were tuned for speech and high packet loss conditions.
Baseball is as American as apple pie. The set top radio quickly became a household item because on any given day of a ball game, tens of thousands of people could tune in and hear the game being called in real time. In this storied American pastime, Rob Glaser saw a fantastic opportunity to advertise his fledgling internet media company, and give the RealAudio system a Real stress test: the Internet's first-ever live broadcast of a baseball game. ESPN SportsZone orchestrated the broadcast, which took place on September 5, 1995: the Seattle Mariners vs. the New York Yankees. Though the broadcast itself was limited to just a few hundred simultaneous listeners on dial-up, by all reports it was a smashing success. And the Seattle Mariners won their game 6-5.
In a review published the following day, Los Angeles Times reporter Daniel Akst wrote: "In my view, such technmoogy eventually will make the Internet an alternative radio system, with no need for federal licenses or expensive broadcast towers, and no limit on how far any broadcast can reach...I begin to get a lump in my throad just contemplating the whole new vistas of time-wasting this opens up for me."
The introduction of RealAudio started a quiet revolution in broadcasting and communication: the technology suddenly enabled terrestrial radio stations, news outlets, even sports and entertainment venues to publish themselves on the brand new "World Wide Web," where they could be discovered and heard by anyone, anywhere, on the planet. RealAudio enabled the creation of entirely new platforms and business opportunities that had not existed before.
To facilitate delivery of audio, RealAudio used the UDP protocol. Just as a terrestrial radio broadcaster cannot know who is listening, or whether they received the message, UDP has the same design: confirmation of the message is unimportant; the transmission must press on regardless. Audio and video can still be understood and interpreted by humans even with mild to moderate packet loss. In that light, UDP was ideal for time-sensitive deliveries, where speed and continuous sending were more important than guaranteed arrival. Consequently, this is why UDP has been given the facetious backronym of "Uncertain Delivery Protocol."
In 1995, the fastest dial-up modems available to consumers had a bitrate of 28.8 kbps, with 14.4 kbps being far more common and affordable. The first RealAudio codec had a nominal encoded bitrate of 8.5 kbps, and an audio sampling rate of 4 kHz. This was basically telephone quality, with some error correction to account for minor losses. The experience was comparable to talking on a cell phone at the time (e.g.: a Motorola StarTAC), and Progressive Networks' codec bore similar features to those used in cellular telephony.
In 1996, RealAudio 3.0 licensed a codec from Dolby Labs (DNET) that could encode high-fidelity speech and near-CD-quality music at bitrates up to 80kbps, though consuming this content would have been difficult for most consumers until the advent of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) modems on plain old telephone networks. College students, businesses with corporate LANs, and government users would have had little trouble enjoying these feeds--assuming the campus or building had a decent sized Internet connection.
In 1998, the "G2" player (version 6.0) was released with a brand new codec developed in-house by engineer Ken Cooke. This new set of codecs could produce wideband speech down to 16 kbps, and stereo FM-quality music with as little as 44 kbps.
Progressive Networks rebranded itself as RealNetworks in 1997, and as the RealAudio Player evolved, it added shortcuts to galleries of curated live and on-demand programming (the TimeCast catalog, later rebranded as "RealGuide"), as well as selective recording capabilities.
This year also saw the introduction of RealVideo. The very first streaming video posted on the Internet was a 2-minute clip of Spike Lee introducing the tap-dancing savant, Savion Glover. RealVideo enabled streaming video over 56K modems, though the bandwidth limitation meant that videos were the size of a postage stamp and had very low frame rates, but it was VIDEO. The 1998 WARPED Tour had live and on-demand streams in RealVideo. Every major news outlet and entertainment company was using RealNetworks. By some accounts, RealAudio and RealVideo represented over 80% of streaming content available on the Internet in the year 2000.
RealAudio was one of a handful of companies specializing in content distribution via multicast networking, which could relay the same content to an infinite number of recipients without consuming additional bandwidth. Multicasting was very complex to implement, and the acquisition and licensing costs of such infrastructure put internet broadcasting well out of reach of most individuals and hobbyists. Thus RealAudio was limited to commercial, educational, and government institutions.
RealNetworks became known and loathed across the Internet for their, ahem, progressive and escalating marketing strategies and data collection practices, which would probably make some consumers and software companies blush today. Starting with RealPlayer 4, it would launch your default web browser to the Real.com home page. In RealPlayer 5, every time the app started, it would ask for your email address. You could always say "Remind me Later," but there was no way to opt out without providing some kind of email address. Later versions of RealPlayer would use the installation AND the first-time startup as an opportunity to market various content portals. It was also around this time that RealPlayer added a persistent icon to the Windows System Tray, a move reviled by many users. The system tray was quickly becoming crowded by other apps competing for that limited space. But RealNetworks didn't seem to care, because they did not have serious competition in the streaming audio business.
Winamp was designed to play audio, but specifically the nascent MP3 format, which used a newly-developed perceptual encoding algorithm to produce true CD-quality music at very small file sizes. MP3 was the result of over a decade of research and evolution by engineers at Fraunhofer IIS (Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen).
The MP3 heralded a golden age of digital music. The first commercial consumer product to use MP3 was the MPMAN in South Korea, and the Diamond Rio portable MP3 player in North America. Later, Creative released the Nomad Jukebox. Then, of course, Apple's iPod, and the rest is history. To the generational cohort growing up at the dawn of the World Wide Web, these portable MP3 players were just as revolutionary and exciting as the Sony Walkman enjoyed by their parents. Just as home recording and the "mixtape" facilitated the rendering of a portable collection of one's music catalog, the MP3 made it possibe for anyone with a computer and a bunch of CDs could digitize their entire collection and take it with them. Combined with greater availability of "high speed" Internet (256-512kbps DSL!), people could then share their personal libraries with anyone in the world.
Nullsoft's founder, Justin Frankel, had uncompromising views about music sharing and the democratization of software and services. He also had a vision that anyone could be their own DJ: to create their own radio station for anyone on the Internet to tune in and listen.
As a broadcasting solution, RealAudio was prohibitively expensive. Microsoft's NetShow Services and Windows Media streaming were included with Windows Server products, but they weren't exactly giving that away for free. Quicktime was available from Apple, and the content creation pipeline was reasonably accessible to most (if you had a Mac), but the hosting and infrastructure required some skill and a non-zero cost outlay. There was market competition, but only for institutions who could afford to shop around and experiment with large scale streaming technologies. There wasn't really anything simple enough for the average Internet user to understand, much less afford.
Thus Nullsoft developed SHOUTcast: a new streaming platform that ran on Windows and Linux, and used plain HTTP as the transport mechanism to deliver streaming audio in the MP3 format. SHOUTcast was free. Anyone could use it. Literally. You could host your own radio station from your bedroom, or your dorm room, with nothing but a computer and a microphone or sound card with line level input. There were also SHOUTcast relay servers for broadcasters with limited bandwidth.
The broadcasting solution was self-contained, with very little configuration required. Additionally, broadcasters could register themselves on a public dirctory, where your radio station could be discovered by someone else halfway around the world. In Winamp, as well as ealier versions of iTunes, there was a built-in method to access the SHOUTcast server directory. One of the earliest large internet stations to use Shoutcast was SomaFM; the other was Digitally Imported Radio. Both still exist today. (Radio Paradise also launched around the same time, and while it may have started with SHOUTcast, it has since moved on to a self-built and self-hosted solution; William Goldsmith developed his own broadcast automation system that is still in use today).
1999 was also a banner year for movies, with such hits as Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, Tarzan, The Blair Witch Project, American Pie, Analyze This, Eyes Wide Shut, The Green Mile, and many others driving traffic to Apple... and drawing attention away from Real Networks.
Though Nullsoft is now defunct and the SHOUTcast directory was shut down, the concept lives on as ICEcast. The solution also at a critical juncture when users were finding a home on sharing portals like Napster and the Underground Internet Music Archive. YouTube launched in 2005 and filled a void for on-demand content created by anyone. RealAudio became less and less relevant, and live synchronized video streaming did not warrant serious consumer attention until the creation of Justin.tv (later Twitch.tv) in 2014.
In 2015, Real had ceased all direct sales of the entire RealMedia content platform. RealAudio itself is a defunct protocol, and the RealServer is no longer available to license. As such, the entire platform is now ABANDONWARE, and their continued use and demonstration is done for educational purposes only, which is protected by various legal statutes and doctrines.
The only reason this project was even remotely possible is because of the Internet Archive, the Macintosh Garden, and some very generous and anonymous data hoarde--I mean, amateur archival enthusiasts. If you can, please make a contribution to both organizations to help preserve history, and ensure that older technology can continue to be demonstrated and explained to future generations.