Online video hosting existed eight years before YouTube, but it could not stream
ShareYourWorld.com launched in 1997, letting people upload clips and whole films in various formats. Bandwidth was thin and transcoding primitive, so nothing played smoothly in the browser, and the site shut in 2001 over budget and bandwidth troubles. Streaming video had to wait for compression mathematics and faster connections to catch up.
The core obstacle was sheer data. Uncompressed standard-definition video runs at 168 megabits per second, and full HD tops a gigabit. The fix traces back to 1973, when Nasir Ahmed, T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao proposed the discrete cosine transform, a lossy technique that throws away detail the eye barely notices. It underpinned H.261 in 1988, the first practical video coding format, then the MPEG and H.26x families from 1991. A modified version later powered MP3 audio in 1994 and AAC in 1999.
Commercial models arrived in stages. Pandora TV, founded in Seoul's Gangnam District in October 2004, was the first sharing site to attach advertisements automatically to user clips and to offer unlimited storage. YouTube followed in 2005, founded by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen. Its trick was converting whatever format users uploaded into Flash-compatible AVC video with AAC sound that played anywhere on the web. Karim posted the first clip, Me at the zoo, in April 2005.
Most platforms today rely on adaptive streaming over ordinary HTTP. A video is encoded at several bit rates, and the player switches between them almost seamlessly as bandwidth or processor load changes. Apple, Microsoft and Adobe each built proprietary versions, and MPEG-DASH emerged as an attempt at one shared standard. Behind the scenes, platforms plug into outside services through APIs for transcoding, recommendations, search and analytics, and heat maps reveal the moments when viewers drift away.
Demand came from camera phones. Their flood of low-resolution clips suited broadband far better than burning DVDs for friends, and few people ran servers of their own. Big broadcasters could build proprietary systems, but it rarely pays to divert effort from content to engineering.
Source: Online video platform
