Streaming media

• 1. Introduction

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  Streaming media is the method by which multimedia data travels across a network and plays back in real time, without requiring the listener or viewer to download a complete file first. That distinction sounds technical, but it reshaped nearly every corner of modern entertainment, commerce, and communication. How did a technology with roots in 19th-century telephone experiments become the dominant way the world consumes music and video? What happened when the courts, the music industry, and hundreds of millions of users collided over who actually owned a digital song? And what is the hidden environmental cost of all those hours of video watched from a couch? The story of streaming is not simply a story about technology. It is a story about power, property, and the strange question of what it means to own something that can be copied instantly and shared across the globe.

• 2. Before the Internet

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  Beginning in 1881, a French service called Theatrophone let subscribers listen to live opera and theatre performances through ordinary telephone lines. It ran until 1932, fifty-one years of music piped directly into the ear. The Telharmonium, a massive electrical instrument, was patented in 1897 and pointed toward the same idea: music delivered over wires rather than sold as a physical object. In Delaware, the Tel-musici service offered a similar concept from 1909 to 1914.

  The most elaborate of these early experiments was the Telephone Music Service, a live jukebox operation that began in 1929 and continued until 1997. A customer in a Pittsburgh bar would deposit money, pick up the telephone on top of the jukebox, and ask an operator to play a specific song. The operator, working in a central studio with a library of more than 100,000 records, would find the disc, place it on one of six turntables, and pipe the music directly over the telephone line to the tavern. The clientele eventually grew to include 120 bars and restaurants across the Pittsburgh area. Revenue was split on a fixed formula: 60 percent for the music service and 40 percent for the tavern owner. The service began with 78s, 33s, and 45s, and later incorporated CDs and tapes. Business passed through a succession of owners, notably Bill Purse, his daughter Helen Reutzel, and finally Dotti White, before city permits and the rising cost of telephone lines made the model unsustainable.

  In the early 1920s, George Owen Squier was granted patents for transmitting and distributing signals over electrical lines. That work became the technical foundation for Muzak, which delivered continuous background music to commercial customers without relying on radio. These early systems demonstrated an appetite that would only grow.

• 3. The Engineering Problem

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  Raw digital audio encoded with pulse-code modulation requires a bandwidth of 1.4 Mbit/s for uncompressed CD audio. Standard-definition video demands 168 Mbit/s, and full high-definition video pushes past 1,000 Mbit/s. Those numbers explain why practical streaming was impossible for so long. Without compression, no network of the 20th century could carry a movie in real time.

  The term "streaming" itself has an older origin than most people realize. It was first used to describe tape drives built by Data Electronics Inc. that were designed to ramp up slowly and run continuously for an entire tape track; the gradual ramp reduced drive costs. By the early 1990s, the word had migrated to describe video on demand over IP networks. Starlight Networks first applied it to video; RealNetworks applied it to audio.

  In 1990, Kalpana introduced the first commercial Ethernet switch. That device enabled faster internal networks, which in turn made early streaming video possible in schools and corporations. Xing Technology, founded in 1989, developed a JPEG streaming product called StreamWorks. In late 1992, StarWorks appeared, allowing on-demand MPEG-1 full-motion video to be accessed randomly on corporate Ethernet networks. On the 24th of June 1993, the band Severe Tire Damage was performing at Xerox PARC when scientists in the same building demonstrated a new multicasting technology called Mbone by broadcasting the performance. The stream reached viewers in Australia and elsewhere. Band member Russ Haines later recalled that the broadcast used approximately half of the total bandwidth of the internet at that moment; the video was updated eight to twelve times per second, and the audio quality was, in his words, "at best, a bad telephone connection."

  RealNetworks pioneered the online broadcast of a baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners in 1995. On the 10th of November 1995, the first symphonic concert streamed over the Internet took place at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, Washington, a collaboration between the Seattle Symphony and guest musicians Slash, Matt Cameron, and Barrett Martin. In October 1994, a school music festival had been webcast from the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington, New Zealand; the technician who arranged it, local council employee Richard Naylor, later noted: "We had 16 viewers in 12 countries."

• 4. Napster and the Public Good

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  Napster launched in early 1999 in Hull, Massachusetts. Shawn and John Fanning, along with Sean Parker, built a peer-to-peer file-sharing network where users could upload and download MP3 files freely. In a 2009 interview, Shawn Fanning described the motivation plainly: Napster "was something that came to me as a result of seeing a sort of unmet need and the passion people had for being able to find all this music, particularly a lot of the obscure stuff, which wouldn't be something you go to a record store and purchase, so it felt like a problem worth solving."

  Economists classify goods by two properties: whether access can be restricted (excludability) and whether one person's use reduces what is available to others (rivalry). For the brief period Napster operated at scale, MP3 files became both non-excludable and non-rival. If you had a computer and an internet connection, nothing stopped you from downloading a song, and your copy did not diminish anyone else's ability to copy the same song. Napster grew faster than any other business in history, eventually reaching about 80 million users globally. The traffic was so intense that many college campuses had to block the site entirely because it created network congestion.

  The platform's weakness was the classic free-rider problem. Every user benefited when someone uploaded a file, but nothing compelled everyone to share back. Most users did share, but there was no built-in mechanism to ensure it. The more fundamental problem, though, was legal. Record labels that were subsidiaries of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI filed lawsuits. The Recording Industry Association of America filed separately on grounds of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. Napster shut down in 2001. The wider P2P ecosystem it had inspired, including LimeWire in 2000, BitTorrent in 2001, and the Pirate Bay in 2003, eventually met similar legal fates.

• 5. A Landmark Court Decision

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  On the 2nd of October 2000, the case A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. was argued before the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The decision came on the 12th of February 2001. The court ruled that a peer-to-peer file-sharing service could be held liable for both contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. The ruling became a landmark for intellectual property law.

  Judge Beezer addressed Napster's claim that its service qualified for fair use under three arguments: sampling, where users made temporary copies before purchasing; space-shifting, where users accessed recordings they already owned on CD; and permissive distribution by artists who wanted their music shared. The court rejected all three. Napster's system, the court found, enabled users to repeatedly copy music in ways that directly affected the market value of the copyrighted work.

  On the contributory infringement question, the court noted that Napster had knowledge of widespread copying and took no action to reduce it, while financially benefiting from the platform's growing use. The court found that as much as 87 percent of the files available on Napster may have been copyrighted, and more than 70 percent may have been owned or administered by the plaintiffs. The injunction that followed ended the period in which digital music functioned as a non-excludable public good. Gary Stiffelman, who represented artists including Eminem, Aerosmith, and TLC, put the industry's position plainly in an interview with the New York Times: "I'm not an opponent of artists' music being included in these services, I'm just an opponent of their revenue not being shared."

• 6. The Streaming Wars

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  When Netflix launched in 2007, it became one of the dominant streaming platforms despite initially offering no original content. For nearly six years, it relied entirely on licensed material before introducing its own shows, including House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and Hemlock Grove. The era that followed became known as the streaming wars: a period of intense competition among Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, Paramount+, Apple TV, Peacock, and many others.

  Disney took a particular approach: it leveraged ownership of popular franchises, including Frozen, Snow White, and the Star Wars and Marvel properties, to draw subscribers away from competitors. Research suggested the exclusive-content strategy could be disadvantageous for consumers, raising spending across platforms, while also diluting the subscriber base across the industry. One countervailing effect was notable: once specific content became available legally on a streaming service, piracy searches for that content fell.

  The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated everything. In the UK alone, 12 million people joined a new streaming service they had not previously subscribed to. Within the first three months of 2020, nearly 15.7 million people signed up for Netflix. Global subscriptions passed 1 billion. In August 2022, a CNN headline declared that the streaming wars were over, as pandemic-era audience growth had stalled and services began cutting production budgets, cracking down on password sharing, and introducing ad-supported tiers. A December 2022 article in The Verge declared the end of what it called the golden age of the streaming wars.

  In September 2023, several services formed the Streaming Innovation Alliance, spearheaded by Charles Rivkin of the Motion Picture Association. Former U.S. representative Fred Upton and former FCC acting chair Mignon Clyburn joined as senior advisors. Founding members included Netflix, Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Discovery+, The Walt Disney Company, and others. Apple, Amazon, Roku, and Tubi were notably absent.

• 7. Music's Second Life

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  Music streaming dismantled, then rebuilt, the economics of the music industry. The Recording Industry Association of America's 2015 earnings report showed that streaming services accounted for 34.3 percent of total music industry revenue that year, growing 29 percent from the previous year. By 2018, streaming revenue had surpassed traditional revenue streams including record sales, album sales, and downloads. US streaming revenue grew 57 percent to $1.6 billion in the first half of 2016 alone, accounting for almost half of industry sales.

  The reversal was stark. From 1999 to 2009, US music revenue fell from $14.6 billion to $6.3 billion, driven by piracy and the decline of CD and download sales. Streaming services shifted the model toward a club good: financially excludable, requiring a monthly payment, but non-rival in the sense that one subscriber's listening does not diminish another's. Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music all competed for position. Spotify reported over 207 million users in 78 countries; Apple Music had about 60 million; SoundCloud had 175 million. Napster itself, owned by Rhapsody since 2011, resurfaced as a subscription service with over 4.5 million users.

  In January 2025, Universal Music Group and Spotify announced a new multi-year agreement aimed at expanding subscription tiers and an audio-visual catalog. Music streaming also reached 4 trillion streams globally in 2023, a jump of 34 percent over the previous year.

• 8. The Hidden Costs

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  A 2019 study estimated that net greenhouse gas emissions from streaming music in the United States ran between 0.2 and 0.35 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year. That figure was higher than in the pre-digital era: estimated emissions from physical music formats were 0.14 million metric tons in 1977, 0.136 million in 1988, and 0.157 million in 2000. The shift to digital did not eliminate the environmental footprint; it changed where the emissions came from.

  A 2021 study looking at data transmission estimated that one hour of streaming or videoconferencing emits carbon dioxide, requires water, and demands a land area roughly the size of an iPad Mini, when accounting for data center infrastructure. The same study found that turning off the camera during video calls could reduce greenhouse gas and water footprints by 96 percent, and that switching from high-definition to standard-definition streaming could yield an 86 percent reduction. A separate study arrived at a far lower estimate of 36 grams of CO2 per hour, concluding that watching a Netflix video for half an hour emitted about the same as driving a gasoline-powered car for 100 meters.

  The purchase of a physical CD may actually be more environmentally friendly if a person plays it more than 27 times. Spotify's built-in local cache reduces the need to re-stream the same songs repeatedly. One pathway to lower emissions at scale is converting the data centers that power streaming to electricity from renewable sources. In 2018, video alone accounted for more than 60 percent of data traffic worldwide and drove 80 percent of the growth in data usage globally, a measure of how deeply streaming had become woven into everyday infrastructure.