Internet Webcast - A History
An Internet webcast is the distribution of streaming multimedia content over the Internet so users can listen to it or watch it live, while it is being streamed or they can capture the streamed content and listen or watch it, as the case may be, at their leisure. An Internet webcast allows content to be accessible from all over the world in one go, because the Internet is not limited by range restrictions of any other form of media such as the television or the radio.
Publicly, the concept of an Internet webcast was first mooted by Brian Raila of GTE Laboratories. It was during the InterTainment '89 in New York City that Raila presented a scenario in which the user would not have to download the entire content so as to listen or watch it. The Internet connection speeds during that time had matured enough to make rudimentary streaming of content possible.
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Another person at GTE Laboratories, James Paschetto came up with a concept demonstrator for an Internet website. Paschetto single-handedly created the first technology demonstrator of an Internet webcast. During the Fall Meeting in October 1995 of the Voice Mail Association of Europe, the first demonstration on Internet Webcast technology was made. Interestingly, the hospitality industry was one of the first adopters of Internet webcast technology. HotelView in collaboration with Visual Data Corp., provided introductory video tours of hotels around the world through the use of Internet webcast technology.
The word 'webcast' was first used in the 1988 novel The Armageddon Blues by Daniel Keys Moran. By the mid-1990s, people from four major Internet webcast companies namely Audionet, Xing Technologies, ITV.net and InterVox Communications came together to name their services such that people would be able to understand it with ease. They had considered to use the term Netcast at first, but there was already a company called NetCast that provided such services and choosing Netcast would have given birth to a number of legal hassles. Since the major reliance was on the technologies of the World Wide Web, the term webcast was deemed appropriate enough. By the turn of the millennium, webcasting over the Internet had grown into an attractive form of mass media. An increase in broadband penetration, the increased focus on user-generated content and evolution of new content licensing schemes such as Creative Commons Licensing have boosted webcasting over the Internet into a firmly entrenched position on the Internet as well as in the minds of people. With the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies and services such as YouTube, Internet webcast has become popular enough to even play a role in the US Presidential election.
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