Now that we're into the 2020s, we can look back at the last decade and definitely see which developments had the biggest impact on our entertainment industries. While AI looks set to change the entertainment landscape this decade, it was streaming that reshaped media in the 2010s. Here's why.
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Streaming Today
Media streaming is going very strong today thanks to famous platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, and Kindle. They changed how audiences consumed video, music, even books, raking in numbers that traditional counterparts struggled to compete with. In the case of Netflix, the video streaming war has begun as their many competitors line up for their piece of the pie.
Streaming has a much wider reach than those services, however. Alongside video and music, it has changed how people play and watch games too. iGaming is a huge online space that has embraced streaming to make its games more interactive and engaging as a result. Streaming allows users to play online roulette games with a real wheel and a dealer overseeing the action. It adds communication and interactivity to a medium that has existed long before streaming technology became viable.
To understand how streaming disrupted the entertainment industry, we need to go back to the start.
The Start Of Streamed Media
It's music that can claim responsibility for the first media streaming. During the earliest years of the internet, streaming was impossible due to poor data rates and bandwidth offered by ISPs. In the 90s, the average data transfer speed was around 15 Kbps – around 50 Mb in an hour.
In 1993, a band called Severe Tire Damage performed at the Palo Alto Research Center, owned by Xerox at the time. Researchers there were working on what would become known as the Mbone. To prove its use, they multicast their performance online using “half of the total bandwidth of the internet” at the time.
Sports and business applications followed, with little impact on entertainment media until the mid-2000s. Multicast and other alternatives like ActiveMovie or QuickTime were largely abandoned for a different standard. In 2005, a Flash-based video-hosting website came to prominence over the rest – YouTube. Netflix came in 2007 along with Amazon's video services, though they both mailed DVDs to their customers back then.
Netflix is shutting down its original business of delivering DVDs by mail https://t.co/1dknQ9URtS
— Bloomberg (@business) April 18, 2023
How Streaming Disrupted Mainstream Media
After a few years, content on sites like YouTube started to amass views in the millions. Going viral helped a lot with this, aided by the social media infrastructure that came from the early 2010s. When content creators pulled this off consistently, they became small-scale celebrities, often with hundreds of thousands of followers.
Meanwhile, Spotify used its freemium service, DRM protections and a new form of streaming royalties to work alongside the music industry. Record labels and their celebrities still get most of the cash while Spotify scrapes off the top. Soon, it became the place where artists would break records with streaming figures.
Netflix, now making its own original content since 2013, has become one of the world's largest subscription platforms – with approx. 238 million subscribers as of August 2023. According to Nielsen numbers, streaming services were the main way to watch TV in American households in 2022. It ate up a third of viewership, against broadcast TV's 20%.
Competitors like Disney+ shifted their content focus away from movies and towards shows instead, and even released movies on the platform when theatres weren't available or a cinematic release wasn't profitable. More recently, the residuals that executives and actors gain from streaming have become a sticking point during the Hollywood writer's strike.
We haven't seen the end of streaming yet – it's still going strong. However, as our media technology improves at a staggering rate, many are watching AI innovations and wondering just how much they'll change our media landscape over the next few years.
