Thoughts on Live Streaming

There’s someone on the roof

It was a typical friday in early 2010. I was still in school, we were all sitting in front of our computers, anxious to head home already.

As the clock approached 4PM, a classmate suddenly exclaimed that she had found something we had to see. We gathered around, and on her browser window was a video player featuring live footage of a man standing on the roof of a building somewhere in my hometown.

The broadcast didn’t last very long, the guy didn’t jump, nobody got hurt and besides getting a small story on the local news later, the whole event was quickly forgotten.

However, the incident left a lasting impression on me. Not only because a real human being could’ve ended his life on a live broadcast, but also because the underlying technology was something mindblowing.

You see, before that day, I had assumed that the power to broadcast something to the world live, in real time, anywhere was a privilege of news reporters and the folks you see on TV. Sure, streaming from home was somewhat viable if you had a great internet connection, the necessary camera equipment and a beefy computer, but as it turned out, that particular livestream of the man on the roof was made by an ordinary guy with a smartphone. What?

This was a time before 4G/LTE connections were a thing, and a very early player on the mobile live-streaming market was already up and running. The service was a startup founded in 2007(!) called Qik, and its features were “Instant Video Sharing with your smartphone”, “Interaction in real-time”, “Chat with friends while they watch you stream live” and “Let your Twitter followers know everytime you record!”. Sound familiar?

Qik was eventually acquired by Microsoft in 2011 and shut down in 2016, and despite offering everything a casual live-streamer on Periscope could want today, it never really took off.

The history of and usage of desktop and mobile live streaming is interesting.

The early years

The earliest example of modern live streaming is from 1993†, but the earliest example I remember is Mogulus (2007), which was renamed to Livestream in 2009. Livestream is still around, and made its breakthrough back in the day by offering professional streaming software and an easy-to-use platform to broadcast yourself.

This screenshot from archive.org gives a view to the past of typical promoted content in the Livestream front page sometime in 2008.

News, Entertainment, Music, Sports, Games. You know, the stuff you see on television, but online! Besides Livestream, other notable services like Ustream (2007), Justin.tv (2007–2014) and Stickam (2005) were around, most operating with the same core principle: All one needs is a webcam and an internet connection to report live to millions of viewers with a single click of the mouse.

On October 30, 2009, the Foo Fighters played their first internet-only live concert through Livestream. On November 1, 2009, you could watch the New York City Marathon live from your browser. Nevertheless, streaming remained a somewhat niché hobby for the common man.

It is worth a mention that YouTube existed since 2005 as well, but didn’t offer Live Streaming for everyone until 2014.

The New Generation

Looking back to Qik and its features, it makes you wonder why didn’t it become such a massive success that Periscope came to be.

There are probably many causes, but I think the main reasons are:

• Mobile internet connections weren’t as good as they are today.
• Smartphones, namely their cameras weren’t as good as they are today.

I made this handy chart:

It seems that Qik probably didn’t make it because there were several different brands and flavors of very different proto-smartphones around, iPhones being relatively new and limiting, and Internet connections and prices of data plans being mostly undesirable.

Fast forward eight years and we have a new generation of consumers — millions of people owning the latest and greatest smartphones with amazing cameras and superfast yet affordable Internet connections.