Book Excerpt: The Birth Of Streaming, Circa 1993
In their new book Binge Times, Deadline’s Dade Hayes and Reuters correspondent Dawn Chmielewski explore the rush into streaming by several media and tech companies finally determined to catch up with Netflix. But the story began a lot earlier than that. The book details a landmark event that happened almost three decades ago: the first film ever to stream on the internet, an experimental 1993 feature called Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. While the film itself was miles from mass entertainment, a host of major stakeholders in the current streaming boom were paying rapt attention to the experiment. It was a moment, as the book recounts, more than a century in the making.
As an independent filmmaker, David Blair had presented his movies at plenty of festivals and college campuses, where the screening ritual was well established. Audiences would wait expectantly for the room to darken before his images would fill the giant screen.
On this April day in 1993, as Blair entered the General Motors building in Manhattan, he knew this screening would have a completely different feel. The audience would watch on their computers as his experimental new work, Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, became the first feature-length film ever streamed online.
A group of people gathered in an office that looked as if it once housed a giant, room-filling computer, sipping drinks from plastic cups. They greeted Blair, who held a VHS cassette of his film. The walls of the room were lined with exposed insulation that looked, to Blair’s eye, “like a cheap Russian space suit.” A lone piece of furniture dominated the room: a table holding a VHS tape player and a high-end Silicon Graphics machine connected via a T-1 dedicated telephone line to the internet’s multicast backbone (or MBone), which was used to transmit real-time video and audio. The streaming experiment would easily outdo the most daring office activity at the time, according to one Sun Microsystems engineer: watching someone brew coffee. This demonstration would require all the computing firepower the group could muster. Only four years earlier, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee had conceived of a way for scientists in universities and research institutions to share information via a network of computers known as the World Wide Web.
Blair had struggled to get distribution for his film, which he wrote and directed. It centered on a maker of weapons guidance systems named Jacob Maker, who falls under the control of his bees. The insects turn out to be agents of dead souls who insert a crystal television in his head, using Maker as a guided missile of sorts to attack Iraqi commandos in the desert.
The filmmaker touted his project on an electronic mailing list known as Phrack, which was devoted to phone hacking. That caught the attention of a noted computer scientist, Dave Farber, who shared the details with members of his “Interesting People” email list.
Soon enough, the buzz among the Technorati reached the ears of the founders of a new magazine celebrating digital culture called Wired. In its review of the film, the magazine hailed it as “one of the hottest pieces of ‘electronic cinema.’” Blair received an invitation to Wired’s launch party, where he encountered “slightly larger, more dangerous fish”—two of whom followed up with a proposition, which he eagerly accepted, to “play [his] movie on the internet.” Soon, the provincial world of independent film would have unprecedented reach.
The technology demonstration, by all accounts, was a clumsy engineering endeavor. Blair popped the film into the VCR and fed it into the computer, which pushed the video out onto the internet. A team of Sun Microsystems engineers in Mountain View tuned in the flickering image on their massive computer workstations midway through its digital premiere.
Thomas Kessler, then engineering manager at Sun, was on the re- ceiving end of the transmission, which in those days was known as a multicast. The stream represented the culmination of research in video compression done at Stanford University, the University of Southern
California, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory distributed via an overlay on top of the internet. Most internet traffic, at that point, was devoted to research and government business. But telecommunications companies like WorldCom and AT&T were interested in creating a more robust network for business applications. “That particular movie—that was the first effort to go completely global,” recalls Kessler. “This guy came along He was doing it as a bit of a publicity play. It was kind of a cult movie. He wanted to get a little coverage. We were looking for interesting things to experiment with so we said, ‘OK.’”
The picture was blurry, in Kessler’s recollection. It was delivered at a sluggish fifteen frames per second, about half the standard broadcast rate, with sound “like a bad phone call.” Nevertheless, that moment, two decades before the widespread adoption of streaming, marked the birth of digital video. Blair found his moment in history’s spotlight oddly anticlimactic. “Here was a room with no seats and a VHS machine,” he said. “This is like the lowest resolution—and nobody’s watching. They carefully put it in, pressed the button on the keyboard, and it just went.” Even if it wasn’t an obvious triumph, the screening was historic.
More than that, it connected with a long line of visionary attempts to make pictures move through machines. The public’s fascination with moving images on a screen can be traced back almost two hundred years and largely parallels the rise of industrialization. As Jeff Kisseloff relates in his indispensable oral history of television, The Box, the first efforts date to the 1820s. “These early marvels had equally marvelous names,” he writes, like the fantascope, the phenakistoscope, and the zoetrope. “They were made by imprinting drawings around the edges of a disc. When the disc spun and was seen through a viewer, the pictures appeared to be in continuous motion.”
After the astonishing invention of the telephone after the Civil War, a feat credited to AT&T cofounder Alexander Graham Bell, spellbound Americans started to anticipate that images would one day mingle with voices. An 1879 spread in Punch magazine showed a fanciful rendering by George du Maurier of a fictional but entirely plausible device beaming moving pictures onto a living room wall. His fanciful pencil drawings showed a family communicating from their home with tennis players taking a break from their match. French artist and writer Albert Robida in that same era—well before the advent of vaudeville, motion pictures, radio, or television—created a futuristic vision of a device similar to du Maurier’s. He named it the téléphonoscope.
A contemporary of Jules Verne who is considered one of the progenitors of the genre of science fiction, Robida wrote and illustrated a range of technology-obsessed stories. One of his most enduring nov- els, Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century), postulated in 1883 a multimedia environment that would take at least a century to become reality. Robida uncannily anticipated devices and consumer habits that lie at the heart of today’s connected, streaming world. He imagined six hundred thousand subscribers paying for live news, tawdry serials akin to modern reality shows, and an array of other enticements. The télépho- noscope screen would take up the entire wall of a room and serve as the nerve center for a pipeline of personalized, on-demand programs from around the world. It would display footage of a war in China, soap operas, musical follies, opera and ballet from European capitals, retail goods for sale, and remote-classroom lessons. (How very 2020.)
RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser remembers crowding around a computer screen with board members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Austin, Texas, one day during the spring of 1993 and glimps ing the future. “You’ve got to see this Mosaic thing,” said Farber, who was a foundation member, as he launched the first modern web browser. Up until that point, the internet had been a collection of flickering letters, numbers, and characters. Mosaic displayed images, inspiring Glaser to go one step further and give the mute collection of words and pictures a voice. He used stock proceeds from his decade at Microsoft and money raised from investors like Lotus founder Mitch Kapor to finance a startup to deliver voice across the web, “because at the bit rates we’re talking about here, doing polyphonic audio in a way that would be at all aesthetically pleasing would seem a challenge,” Glaser said. His,company launched the RealAudio Player in April 1995 with a broadcast of National Public Radio’s morning and evening news programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered and updates from ABC News. Internet speeds and compression were continually improving, making it possible to stream music and video.
Around the same time, Mark Cuban was sitting in a California Pizza Kitchen in Dallas, having lunch with his friend and business partner Todd Wagner, chewing over an idea of transmitting live sports to people’s pagers. “I didn’t think that it was feasible to broadcast to pagers,” said Cuban. “So we abandoned that idea quickly and I discussed with Todd that I could try to figure out a way to use this brand-new thing called the internet to listen to our alma mater Indiana University’s sports.” Anything would be better than putting a radio next to a speakerphone in Bloomington so he could listen to the games in Dallas. The duo launched AudioNet.com from the second bedroom in Cuban’s home, selling a local AM radio station on the notion “that the internet could be as big a disruptive force to radio as cable was to TV.” They hooked up a $30 VCR to the radio station’s audio board and every eight hours, when the tape was full, brought it to Cuban’s house, encoded it, and put it on a server to stream. By the time it went public in 1998, in a record-setting IPO, the rechristened Broadcast.com was carrying live events, including the Super Bowl. Its sale to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, at the peak of dot-com mania in 1999, would make the company’s provocative cofounder with a Texas-sized swagger a billionaire. Netflix, founded in 1997, would soon be able to lay the foundation for its global business on these early technologies, as would internet e-commerce pioneer Amazon.com and democratizing video platform YouTube. “We made streaming mainstream,” said Cuban. “We made it something that millions of people used every day. It was a special time.”
From the book, Binge Times: Inside Hollywood’s Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix. Copyright ©2022 by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
