Timeline of online video

This is a timeline of online video, meaning streaming media delivered over the Internet.

Overview

Time period	Key developments in online video web sight
1974–1992	Development of practical video coding standards. The development of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) lossy compression method leads to the first practical video formats, H.261 and MPEG, initially used for online video conferencing.
1993–2004	Early days of the World Wide Web. Several container formats for streaming the first videos are released. Some sites, like Newgrounds, heavily rely on these container formats to display online video. Due to quality issues caused by low bandwidth and bad latency, very little streaming video existed on the World Wide Web until 2002 when VHS quality video with reliable lip sync became possible.
2005–2010	Mass-streaming services like YouTube and Netflix become massively popular for streaming online video. Broadband penetration increases, allowing significant fractions of the population to stream online video. Macromedia Flash is the most popular format for displaying online video, as it is used by YouTube and many other sites.
2011–2016	HTML5 starts to displace Flash. Livestreaming becomes increasingly popular, especially in the form of services like Twitch. Many social media startups integrate the streaming of short segments of video, like Vine and Keek. These are, in turn, integrated into the most popular services like Instagram and Facebook.

Full timeline

Year	Month and date	Event type	Details
1974	January	Technology	The discrete cosine transform (DCT), a form of lossy compression, was first proposed in 1972 by Nasir Ahmed, who then developed the algorithm with T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao at the University of Texas in 1973.[1] They first presented the DCT algorithm in January 1974.[2][3] It is the most important data compression technique that later enabled practical video streaming.[4]
1988	November	Technology	The H.261 video coding standard is revealed by the ITU-T.[5] The adoption of discrete cosine transform (DCT) video compression made it the first practical video coding format,[6] and it was used for online video conferencing.[7] All MPEG video coding standards that followed (including MPEG-1, MPEG-2 Video, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and HEVC) have since used DCT video compression.[4]
1993	May 22	Technology	Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, originally released in 1991, is the first film to be streamed on the Internet. Due to bandwidth limitations it is broadcast at 2 frames per second rather than the standard 24 frames per second.[8]
1995	September 5	Technology	ESPN SportsZone streams a live radio broadcast of a baseball game between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees to thousands of its subscribers worldwide using cutting-edge technology developed by a Seattle-based startup company named Real Networks – the first livestreaming event.[9]
1995		Technology	Macromedia releases Shockwave Player for Netscape Navigator, which becomes the primary format of streaming media for the late 1990s and 2000s (until it is gradually supplanted by HTML5).[10]
1997		Companies	ShareYourWorld.com, a predecessor to YouTube, is founded by Chase Norlin, and is subsequently shut down in 2001.[11]
1998	Late	Technology	MPEG-4, a method of defining compression of audio and visual (AV) digital data, is introduced.[12][13][14][15][16]
1999		Technology	Microsoft introduces streaming feature in Windows Media Player 6.4. It introduces the ASF file format, which allows storage of multiple video and audio tracks inside a single file. It also introduces Windows Media streaming protocols that support switching streams during broadcast. This technology is most commonly referred to as Multiple Bit Rate ASF, or simply MBR.[17]
1999	June	Technology	Apple introduces a streaming media format in its QuickTime 4 application.[18]
2002	October	Technology	Adaptive bit rate over HTTP is created by the DVD Forum at the WG1 Special Streaming group.
2003	May	Technology	The On2 TrueMotion VP6 codec is released.[19]
2004	June	Products	MindGeek is founded as Too Much Media. Its name is changed to Manwin in 2010, and then MindGeek in October 2013. Its operations are primarily related to Internet pornography, but also include other online properties such as the comedy video website videobash.com and celebrity gossip site celebs.com.[20][21]
2004	September 9	Products	First cloud-based video editor launched.
2005	January 25	Products	Google Video launches.[22]
2005	March 15	Companies	Dailymotion, a French video-sharing website, is founded.[23]
2005	April 23	Companies	YouTube opens for video uploads, and the first YouTube video uploaded on April 23, 2005 is titled Me at the zoo.[24] Between March and July 2006, YouTube grows from 30 to 100 million views of videos per day.
2006	May 14	Companies	Crunchyroll, an American website and international online community focused on video streaming East Asian media including anime, manga, drama, music, electronic entertainment, and auto racing content, is founded.[25]
2006	October 1	Companies	Justin.tv, a live-streaming service that is the parent company of Twitch, is founded by Justin Kan.[26]
2006	September 7	Products	Amazon introduces video on demand service Amazon Video.[27]
2006	October 9	Mergers	Google acquires YouTube.[28]
2006	October 31	Companies	LiveLeak, a UK-based video sharing website that lets users post and share videos (often of reality footage, politics, war, and other world events), is founded.
2006	December	Companies	Youku, one of China's top online video and streaming service platforms, is founded.[29]
2007	January 15	Products	Netflix announces that it will launch streaming video.[30]
2007	February	Technology	HTML5 specification introduces the video element for the purpose of playing videos. This allows embedding video to no longer necessitate a third-party plugin, as it can be played natively in the browser. HTML5 would later overtake Flash as the primary mechanism for broadcasting video.[31]
2007	May 25	Companies	PornHub, a pornographic video sharing website, is founded by the web developer Matt Keezer as a website within the company Interhub.[32]
2007	September	Companies	Vevo is founded. It offers music videos from two of the "big three" major record labels, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.[33]
2007	September 5	Technology	Microsoft introduces Microsoft Silverlight, an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, similar to Adobe Flash.[34]
2008	February 25	Products	DivX announces that it will shut down Stage6,[35] stating that it is unable to continue to provide the attention and resources required for its continued operation.[36]
2008	March 10	Technology	Macromedia Flash moves to the H.264 encoding codec.[37]
2008	March 12	Companies	Hulu, an online streaming service for TV/movies, launches for public access in the United States.[38]
2009	January	Products	Google discontinues the ability to upload videos to Google Video.[39]
2009	November	Technology	Apple first introduces HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol.[40]
2010	March	Acquisitions	PornHub is purchased by Fabian Thylmann as part of the Manwin conglomerate, now known as MindGeek.[41]
2010	April 22	Companies	iQiyi, an online video platform based in Beijing, China launches.[42]
2010	December	Companies	Viki, an international video website offering TV shows, movies, and other premium content, is founded and gets Series A round funding.[43]
2011	January	Technology	Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP – which enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers – becomes a draft international standard.[44] The MPEG-DASH standard is published as ISO/IEC 23009-1:2012 in April, 2012.
2011	April	Companies	Vudu announces the launch of its online streaming service.[45]
2011	May	Acquisitions	Manwin/MindGeek acquires the pornographic video sharing website YouPorn.[46]
2011	June 6	Companies	Justin.tv spins off its gaming division as Twitch, which officially launches in public beta.[47]
2011	July	Companies	Keek – a free online social networking service that allows its users to upload video status updates, which are called "keeks" – launches.[48]
2012	January 29	Companies	Megaupload (and Megavideo) are shut down by the FBI.[49]
2012	June	Companies	Vine, a short-form video sharing service where users can share six-second-long looping video clips, is founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll.[50][51]
2012	December	Companies	Snapchat adds the ability to send video snaps in addition to photos.[52]
2013	June 13	Product	Instagram launches video sharing.[53]
2015	January 27	Products	YouTube drops Flash for HTML5 video as default.[54]
2015	March	Companies	Periscope, a live video streaming app for iOS and Android developed by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein is launched (and acquired by Twitter before its launch).[55]
2015	May	Companies	Meerkat, a mobile app that enables users to broadcast live video streaming through their mobile device, releases its app for both iOS and Android.[56]
2016	January	Companies	Facebook launches livestreaming to everyone with Facebook Live.[57]

References

1. Nasir Ahmed (1991). "How I Came Up With the Discrete Cosine Transform". Digital Signal Processing. 1 (1): 4–5.
2. Ahmed, Nasir; Natarajan, T.; Rao, K. R. (January 1974), "Discrete Cosine Transform", IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-23 (1): 90–93, doi:10.1109/T-C.1974.223784
3. "T.81 – DIGITAL COMPRESSION AND CODING OF CONTINUOUS-TONE STILL IMAGES – REQUIREMENTS AND GUIDELINES" (PDF). CCITT. September 1992. Retrieved 12 July 2019.
4. Ce, Zhu (2010). Streaming Media Architectures, Techniques, and Applications: Recent Advances: Recent Advances. IGI Global. p. 26. ISBN 9781616928339.
5. "(Nokia position paper) Web Architecture and Codec Considerations for Audio-Visual Services" (PDF). H.261, which (in its first version) was ratified in November 1988.
6. Ghanbari, Mohammed (2003). Standard Codecs: Image Compression to Advanced Video Coding. Institution of Engineering and Technology. pp. 1–2. ISBN 9780852967102.
7. Huang, Hsiang-Cheh; Fang, Wai-Chi (2007). Intelligent Multimedia Data Hiding: New Directions. Springer. p. 41. ISBN 9783540711698.
8. Markoff, John (1993-05-24). "Cult Film Is a First On Internet". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-06-08.
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13. WG11 (MPEG) (March 2002). "Overview of the MPEG-4 Standard". Retrieved 2010-04-11.
14. WG11 (1997-11-21), Text for CD 14496-1 Systems (MS Word .doc), retrieved 2010-04-11
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17. "A Brief History of Multi-Bitrate Streaming". Alexzambelli.com. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
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21. "Manwin Canada: A Leader in Web Design, IT, Web Development & SEO!". ca.manwin.com. Archived from the original on 7 November 2011. Retrieved 23 December 2014. Established in June 2004, Manwin is an international organization, with corporate offices in Europe.
22. Google Video Search Live
23. Carvajal, Doreen. "Taking on the Godzilla of video-sharing sites. " The New York Times. Friday 21 March 2008. Retrieved 4 May 2011.
24. Alleyne, Richard (July 31, 2008). "YouTube: Overnight success has sparked a backlash". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved January 17, 2009.
25. "Crunchyroll CEO: Making Online Anime Pay". ICv2. 2008-12-15. Retrieved 2008-12-15.
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27. "Amazon.com Investor Relations: Press Release". corporate-ir.net.
28. "Google closes $A2b YouTube deal". The Age. Melbourne. Reuters. November 14, 2006. Retrieved March 3, 2007.
29. Kristen Nicole2007-11-21 06:47:07 UTC (2007-11-21). "Youku Hits the Jackpot with $25M". Mashable.com. Retrieved 2014-06-28.
30. "Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC". The New York Times. January 16, 2007. Retrieved May 21, 2016.
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33. "Queen Rania calls on music world to support 1GOAL education campaign". December 10, 2009. Archived from the original on December 4, 2012. Retrieved September 3, 2015.
34. "Silverlight architecture". Retrieved 2007-06-05.
35. "DivX Announces Plans to Shut Down Stage6.com". DivX.com. February 25, 2008. Archived from the original on February 27, 2008.
36. "Stage6 Shut Down"., stage6.com
37. "Exploring Flash Player support for high-definition H.264 video and AAC audio". Adobe.com. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
38. "Welcome to Hulu « The Hulu Blog". Blog.hulu.com. Retrieved May 30, 2016.
39. Turning Down Uploads at Google Video, by Michael Cohen, Product Manager, January 14, 2009, Official Google Video Blog, accessed April 23, 2009
40. Pantos, Roger; May, William. "HTTP Live Streaming". tools.ietf.org. Retrieved 2019-09-24.
41. Buse, Uwe (20 December 2012). "Harnessing the Internet: The German Porn King's Revolutionary Model". der Spiegel.
42. "Baidu | Press Releases". ir.baidu.com. Retrieved 2015-12-29.
43. "Viki". Crunchbase. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
44. ISO/IEC DIS 23009-1.2 Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH)
45. "Vudu Launches Streaming Service". Retrieved May 30, 2016.
46. "Manwin Acquires YouPorn.com". AVN. 10 May 2011. Archived from the original on 2 April 2014. Retrieved 20 December 2014.
47. Wilhelm, Alex (June 6, 2011). "Twitch: Justin.tv's killer new esports project". The Next Web.
48. Dobby, Christine. "Toronto's Keek raises $18M for social video networking platform". Retrieved January 17, 2012.
49. "Megaupload (and Megavideo) shut down by the Feds". Ew.com. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
50. Sippey, Michael (January 24, 2013). "Vine: A new way to share video". Twitter Blog. Twitter. Retrieved July 25, 2013.
51. Crook, Jordan (January 24, 2013). "Twitter's 6-Second Video Sharing App, Vine, Goes Live In The App Store". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 26, 2013.
52. J.J. Colao, "Snapchat Adds Video, Now Seeing 50 Million Photos A Day", Forbes, Dec 14, 2012. Retrieved May 16, 2016.
53. "Instagram Launches 15-Second Video Sharing Feature, With 13 Filters And Editing". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved April 15, 2016.
54. "YouTube drops Flash for HTML5 video as default". Theverge.com. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
55. Shontell, Alyson (26 March 2015). "What it's like to sell your startup for ~$120 million before it's even been launched: Meet Twitter's new prized possession, Periscope". Business Insider. Retrieved 26 March 2015.
56. "Meerkat raises $12 million - Business Insider". Businessinsider.com. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
57. "Facebook Livestreaming Opens Up to Everyone With an iPhone". Wired.com. Retrieved July 31, 2016.