[ih] Evolution of Internet audio and video

[Barbara Denny]

 There might be some information in dtic on this topic.  I think a lot of early experimentation was done on DARTnet (DARPA T1 testbed), including multicast (DVMRP). I know I tried sending video using the Sun videopix card across to BBN on DARTnet to see how well it might work  when the card was released (Charlie Lynn was always great in helping me do stuff) and then a little more testing later with Ron Fredrick? at PARC when he heard what I had done. He was developing his own video capture card. My experiment was probably only mentioned in a monthly report. Following the contracting thread to get relevant reports might be difficult. For example , SRI's work was done under a contract that had little obvious relationship to DARTnet from the title.  Besides SRI, DARTnet folks included people  from ISI east and west,  Xerox PARC, LBL, BBN, USC, MIT and UDel.  Hope I didn't forget anyone. Mike St. Johns and Paul Mockapetris were the project managers if that helps you narrow down the possibilities.  I am not sure if there was an earlier PM as I took over for SRI when Paul McKenney left.
Of course, Henning Schulzrinne did some early work too but he was not part of DARTnet. He might still have some more records from that earlier time period.
barbara
    On Monday, September 29, 2025 at 01:13:46 PM PDT, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 One of the aspects of Internet history that is not much discussed is the 
evolution of the net to carry audio and video.

It is sad that Steve Casner died far too soon - he was a major force in 
so much of the transformation of the net into what it is today, an 
alternative to broadcast radio and TV.

(It's kinda natural that I fell into network audio/video - my 
grandfather was a fake radio maker.  He made "Pilco", not "Philco" 
radios that he sold out of the trunk of his car between NY and Boston 
during the 1930's.  And my father was involved with the development and 
deployment of color TV in the early 1950s.  And my extended family has 
always been deep into the performing arts.)

Of course there were the early experiments by SRI with the packet radio 
van driving up and down US 101. But there's not much talk about how we 
experimented with IP multicast, early implementations of audio/video and 
shared whiteboard (vic, vat, sd?  Van Jacobson and others did some 
seriously good work!)  And how Real Audio (was that the correct name?) 
kinda dominated by doing non-muliticast streaming.

Steve Casner, Chia-Chee Kuan, Scott Firestone, and I at Precept Software 
(under the direction of Judy Estrin) wrestled mightily with the 
difficulties of IP multicast, poor media clocks in sending and receiving 
devices, codecs, mpeg streams, imperfect flows of UDP packets, network 
path resource reservation [RSVP, "integrated services"].  We actually 
created something pretty good - although my retinas would leap out of 
eyes and strangle me if I ever were to watch our two test videos - Lion 
King or Blade Runner - again.

Netflix was started very close to my former office in Scotts Valley - 
and although it was not in a garage, it's space wasn't too many steps 
better than a garage.  The post office we use in Scotts Valley is rather 
large for that small city - which is probably because that post office 
handled many, perhaps all, of those red envelopes.

My wife and I did an interview with the surviving members of the first 
Internet Band, Severe Tire Damage and created a quite poor video about 
it (my wife and I are live theatre people; we knew little about cameras, 
lights, and microphones.)  It was interesting how that band and that 
interview touched matters that have become fairly major issues, such as 
copyright, permission to transmit, bandwidth consumption, and, of 
course, the Palo Alto internet party scene (which paled only to the 
Interop shownet party scene which extended from Tokyo to Santa Cruz to 
the Youghiogheny River to DC [we rented the Air and Space museum] to 
Paris.  The role of Single Malt Scotch in the history of the net is a 
topic that deserves exploration.)

Here's a link to a page with the video and commentary about Severe Tire 
Damage.  Please forgive the poor video and sound quality, we were 
neophytes at this stuff.

https://www.history-of-the-internet.org/videos/std/

For the last 30 years I've been chatting up people in the artistic 
(mostly theatre) and technical communities on ways we can transform 
Internet media to break the fourth wall and create the kind of emotional 
relationship between performance and audience that we can get with live 
theatre.  I should not have been, but I was, surprised when people began 
to realize that the biggest customer for that kind of thing would 
probably be industries that deal in rude content.

         --karl--