Archive for July, 2009
May 1999. A beautiful, hot day. We were live backstage at the Dutch Freedom Festival, an open air festival. Producing a webcast. We had cleared the rights for most of the bands.
Except for one UK band which I will not name. We saw the manager and asked him if we could get the rights to film and webcast the band’s performance.
2000. We produced a large webcast for the EuroSonic / Noorderslag pop festival. We had built another ad-hoc CDN with streaming servers in multiple Dutch ISP networks.
Each server was connected to 1Gbps. But one of the ISP’s didn’t tell us that that was the capacity of their entire backbone. So we broke the Internet for many, many users that night.
They couldn’t get their email. Or surf the web. But we had many enthusiastic viewers. Sorry! :-)
So much for a CDN, right? We needed to talk to the ISP’s because if their networks couldn’t handle the streams, how could we grow our webcast production business? So that’s what I did.
Until 1998 we streamed in RealVideo. In 1999 QuickTime and Windows Media streaming came to market. (We had ignored Netshow).
We did some tests and wanted to be able to stream in these formats as well. But we did not want to buy extra servers for each format.
So we had to think of a clever way to run multiple services on existing hardware.
In 1996 Dutch telecom operator introduced ‘Het Net’. It was a dialup internet. But it wasn’t connected to the Internet.
A typical old school ‘walled garden’ idea. That of course failed and Het Net became a regular, even successful access provider.
Anyway, we were hired to produce a webcast for the Ministry of International Affairs. And this webcast had to be available both on the regular internet and on Het Net.
In 1996 I started an innovative website development and webcast production company, together with six partners. Our focus was on design and communication.
We designed and built a lot of websites for governments, companies and events. These were still experimental years. I mean, this was the year of Internet Explorer 3.0… ouch.
Between 1995 and 2001 I was responsible for large scale webcast productions. My personal favorites were the EuroSonic/Noorderslag festivals.
Over 150 bands performed in over twenty venues, around the city of Groningen. The festivals were traditionally broadcasted live on the radio.
We wanted to give the audience a great online experience. Our largest production involved over 55 staff members.
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.
I worked at least 80 hours per week to learn and to produce. It was a great time and I learned so much. At night I was a lightjockey for concerts and dance nights. In the late morning I designed posters and silk-screened them myself. In the afternoon I designed the monthly magazine and in the evening I helped producing video productions. I did publicity and marketing. I almost lived there.
But I still had to wash dishes to make a living…