The Invention That Made Streaming Video Possible - The Lightbulb Moment

the year was 1998. u.s president bill clinton was one year into a second term when the scandal that would overshadow his presidency broke he was set to stand before a grand jury and testify and the nation was set to watch some on their huge cathode ray tube computers with a little help from the world wide web a few months later on february 5th 1999 the victoria secret fashion show took the same approach deciding this would be the very first year they would broadcast the show over the web it accrued 1.5 million viewers the rush to online video began webcasted events exploded in popularity [Music] consumers were hungry for internet video there was just one problem streaming video in the late 1990s was an excruciating experience think about trying to watch a video where you're getting maybe one frame every two or three seconds and it's the size of a postage stamp no joke i mean that's how small the window was and it didn't work very well too many people tuned in there wasn't enough infrastructure capacity in place at the time streaming couldn't be a mainstream tool until these major quality hurdles could be overcome and that wouldn't be possible until the groundbreaking introduction of the cdn this is the lightbulb moment a cheddar and curiosity stream original series though we like to think of the internet as a nebulous cloud floating above it's much more physical than we give it credit for and in the early days the physical limits of the internet were inescapable if too many people visited a website at the same time congestion would overwhelm the servers then there was the issue of geography the internet is a network of networks if you're trying to retrieve packets of information like a web page and its servers are located geographically far away from you your computer has to send out a request that travels through different layers of the interconnected chain to retrieve that web page once that request is received the server can approve the request and start sending individual packets back through the chain these packets have to travel the same long distance from the server back to your computer though it's not always the defining factor generally speaking the farther away a server is the longer it takes to retrieve the packets that make up a web page which for a consumer means longer loading times this worked okay for static web pages but for any large file it was going to be a problem and video required some heavy lifting in 1995 streaming video was a dream at best the internet just wasn't built for it back then object sizes on the internet were very very very very small there was no video there was no software downloads there was no call of duty patches that are gigantic it was all jpegs it was gifs maybe it was javascript or some html code it was very very small objects video by comparison is massive a short video clip could be a thousand times the size of a photo or more because of this streaming video struggled to become mainstream in the 90s at the time the best way to transfer video was to host the file on a server and have the recipient spend a substantial amount of time downloading it it worked but it was a far cry from high quality streaming video for the quality of streaming to improve videos needed to start up faster and be more reliable and computer engineers were up to the challenge they created a solution that would be called a content delivery network or cdn for short and it revolutionized the internet [Music] mit applied mathematics professor and algorithmic expert dr tom leighton was sitting down the hall from tim berners-lee the man who many refer to as the father of the world wide web berners-lee posed a problem to the wider mit community because of the way the web was built congestion was bound to become an issue that held people back from speedy web browsing [Music] dr layton felt he could solve this congestion with math using algorithms to intelligently duplicate and route content he and a few colleagues got to thinking if geographical distance was the problem just get rid of the distance replicate the content and bring that content closer to people this lessens the number of hops that computers would have to make to retrieve information [Music] and reduces the likelihood that any one server would get overwhelmed leighton called his company akamai and it's still one of the largest cdn companies in the world today but cdns are just part of the puzzle they help get the content physically closer to you which helps it load speedily but making that content look good is a whole separate issue the secret ingredients for getting high resolution streaming video are bitrate and compression bitrate essentially is just a measure of how much of a file you can transfer in real time usually measured per second larger files are generally higher quality but streaming large files takes more bandwidth in video bitrate is everything we were on dial-up there was just a limit to the amount of what we call bits that you could actually push through the wire to the consumer it was literally a physical restraint and in the early days bitrate was low very low mostly due to physical constraints but even with those limits internet video exploded in the early 2000s and no platform took off faster than [Music] youtube oh my god founded in 2005 youtube democratized video making its platform was reliable for the time but it wasn't without its faults if you are on youtube in those early years you'll probably remember that watching a video went a lot like this alright so here we are one of the uh elephants buffering was the absolute worst part of youtube or any other streaming video platform in those early days and with that realization came a simple but game changing solution when adaptive bitrate came around which is also something we call variable bitrate content owners starting encoding the video on 300k 500k one meg so the point was if you're watching it at 500k and you're bandwidth degraded instead of the video stopping at 500k it would just reduce the bitrate to 300k but keep playing or in simpler terms when you're watching a youtube video in high definition and your connection weakens the player will automatically drop you down to a lower resolution to make sure that the video keeps playing the adaptive bitrate really improved the customer experience because the moment we could get rid of as an industry the rebuffering what happened consumers watched more content but having a solid bitrate is only one part of the two-part secret sauce for improving the visual quality of internet video the other part is compression and decompression referred to as codex there are two main ways to do compression lossy and lossless lossy compression reduces the file size with an obvious reduction in quality lossless compression reduces the file size without losing any quality lossless compression is the kind that video distributors like because it makes for a better user experience it relies on redundancies in each frame to figure out where it can remove information so for example in this shot from avengers end game the background doesn't change much but tony stark moves around a lot instead of redrawing a new pixel for each frame each time good compression allows for the pixels in the background that aren't changing much to be remembered and reused for the following frames only the portions of the frame where lots of movement occur like tony's face and arm are redrawn with each frame this results in a high quality video at a smaller file size for internet video to be as efficient and high quality as possible all of these technologies have to work together here's how they do it let's say netflix is preparing to release the newest season of stranger things after it's edited and ready to be uploaded to the netflix server it has to be compressed they have an entire team over there that just looks at how do we encode video frame by frame whether it's based on lighting whether it's based on colors all these different variables they compress that file into the smallest form it can be while retaining the highest quality it can they also encode it at lower bit rates aka lesser quality to give a few possible options in case your internet connection doesn't allow for the highest resolution giving consumers flexibility to take advantage of adaptive bit rate these files are also encoded into different formats that are specialized for every device the content could be played on all of these files are then uploaded to netflix's network seeing as stranger things is one of the most watched shows on the platform they expect people to watch it as soon as it launches in preparation for this they ensure that a copy of the files for each episode is replicated across all the cdn servers they have strategically located across the globe these servers act as a local hub for where the file will be stored for whenever a nearby consumer wants to retrieve it the content is saved on multiple edge servers so that when a multitude of people try to access it each individual can access the server that's geographically closest to them resulting in the least amount of lag between when you click the play button and when the content actually starts playing all of these technologies come together to deliver an experience that works almost like magic as we progress towards a future where video video games and potentially vr will dominate the internet landscape it's clear that the next frontier for streaming will require a lot of new infrastructure and ingenuity fortifying access to reliable broadband internet will be paramount making these services affordable will be another challenge but once we overcome these obstacles streaming's full potential could be realized a technology that will define our future thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video please like subscribe and don't forget to hit the bell for notifications you can watch full 22-minute episodes every wednesday at 8pm eastern on cheddar's live network or anytime on curiositystream

Channel: Cheddar

Views: 323,108

Rating: 4.8770814 out of 5

Keywords: Cheddar, cheddar explains, cheddar explores, explainer, the lightbulb moment, lightbulb moment, streaming, streaming video, youtube, netflix, amazon prime, cdn, hulu, technology, tech, inventions, invention, television, video, movies, VR, buffering, resolution, content delivery network, internet, bitrate, fps, compression, lossless, lossy, 8k, tv, streaming services, streaming video games, buffer, loading, 90s, 4k, bits, kilopbit, megabit, framerate, playback, HD, disneyplus, roku, hbomax, sling tv

Id: OV3legWSi6U

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021