Comment by matthewdgreen
Comment by matthewdgreen 2 days ago
RealPlayer in the late 90s turned into (working) Napster, Gnutella and then the iPod in 2001, Podcasts (without the name) immediately after, with the name in 2004, Pandora in 2005, Spotify in 2008. So a decade from crummy idea to the companies we’re familiar with today, but slowed down by tremendous need for new (distributed) broadband infrastructure and complicated by IP arrangements. I guess 10 years seems like a long time from the front end, but looking back it’s nothing. Don’t go buying yourself a Tower Records.
While I get the point... to be pedantic though, Napster (first gen), Gnutella and iPod were mostly download and listen offline experiences and not necessarily live streaming.
Another major difference, is we're near the limits to the approaches being taking for computing capability... most dialup connections, even on "56k" modems were still lucky to get 33.6kbps down and very common in the late 90's, where by the mid-2000's a lot of users had at least 512kbps-10mbps connections (where available) and even then a lot of people didn't see broadband until the 2010's.
that's at least a 15x improvement, where we are far less likely to see even a 3-5x improvement on computing power over the next decade and a half. That's also a lot of electricity to generate on an ageing infrastructure that barely meets current needs in most of the world... even harder on "green" options.