First webcast
In 1994 I produced my first webcast for a metal concert.
In the year before, we already published near-realtime video clips of concerts online. But we wanted it to be live. Just because.
So I sat down with Gerad from the video department and Rudo who was a Unix fan. We managed to trick Netscape 1.12b(?) with a HTTP-keep-alive / Server-push-JPG trick. This technology is still popular with webcams. We captured frames with a Mac. Sent them to a web server. That pushed the JPGs to the browser, replacing each previous image. No audio. Perhaps just one frame per second. Four viewers. But it was live video!
I realised that we were with the first mortal souls who had done a live transmission over the internet: without a broadcasting license, without the infrastructure or the deep pockets of broadcasters or cable operators. Just us, a crazy idea, a computer, a modem, some scripts and some spare time.
I thought: this will change the way people watch TV. This will enable broadcasting for an enormous bunch of companies who want to broadcast video, but have no means: no frequencies, no budget. It brings true democratization of the media.
And I decided that I was going to dive deep into this small revolution and make it happen. Not even for commercial reasons. Because this was just insanely great.
I was so enthusiastic that I forgot which metal band actually was performing…
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