How many Realnetworks streams from 1996 are playable today? I’d wager not many.
By 1996 it was obvious that streaming video was technically possible. I don’t think it was anywhere near as obvious that it would become a cultural force to the extent that it has, nor that archiving such streams was particularly important. Not to mention the monetary angle: such deals would have cost the BBC more money and I’m not sure the majority of the population would have seen it as a worthy use of money at the time.
You're talking about people finding out that streaming was technically possible, not that society would adopt it as the way to distribute content in the future.
I'm asking the exact same thing. For some reason at least the European national tax/license-paid broadcasters that I have direct knowledge of only serve a very small portion of their back catalog. Even when there are no third parties to worry about.
I'm giving European national radio broadcasters in general a hard time because the have chosen not to prioritize public access to old radio broadcasts that the public in those countries already paid for.
There is a clear pattern that simply does not make sense (unless there's systematic corruption or mismanagement).
> that the public in those countries already paid for
But they presumably didn't pay for streaming rights and for contracts with streaming residuals - isn't that the point? Isn't that the whole problem? Otherwise... they'd be streaming them.
That's what I've been trying to say. Most radio programs made by European national broadcasters are fully financed by themselves. Programs containing music is a separate story, of course.
Nevertheless, I've haven't seen a European broadcaster that has a reasonable ~20 year archive of their own news/political analysis/etc shows online. (Perhaps one exists, though?)
They point is that they have had 20+ years to figure this out, and they typically haven't. My understanding is that this kind of content is available for a year and then removed.
> Most radio programs made by European national broadcasters are fully financed by themselves ... Nevertheless ...
Fully financing something doesn't say anything about the contract you agreed and the terms of residuals for your talent and other resources you used. If you didn't agree a residual for 'streaming', which you were unlikely to do until maybe 2007 or so, then 'fully financing' it would not help you.
So that time machine explains how I can't listen to e.g. news or political analysis broadcasts from say 2016 from a public broadcaster in a typical European country, in 2021?
In 1996, almost everyone in the UK was still on dialup. Real videos typically resulted in significant latency for a not great quality image. As such, streaming wasn't obvious at that time, at least as a ubiquitous access medium.
(Audio, not video. Doesn't anyone remember that Realnetworks only did audio at first?) Okay, let's say that high audio quality (mp3 128 kbps) audio streaming wasn't obvious until the year 2000. Surely after year 2000 all of the rights must have been worked out and all of the radio shows were properly stored and served for public on-demand consumption?
