[ih] Evolution of Internet audio and video

[Craig Partridge]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 2:13 PM 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.
>

I worked on the edge of some of that evolution and here are some
complementary thoughts (and yes, Steve Casner did lots of the heavy
lifting).

>From where I sat (at BBN, worrying about high speed networks), there were
three arcs:

   -  Building networks that could conceivably carry reasonable audio and
   video -- here, the Wideband Satellite Network placed a critical role in the
   1980s(?).  It offered a multimegabit service to a selected number of
   locations in the Continental US and was used by Internet researchers to
   hold video conferences.  It was, I think, a successor/influenced by work by
   Steve Casner and Danny Cohen at ISI, but I could be wrong.  Then the
   Gigabit networking effort led by Bob Kahn blew the bandwidth barrier away
   and brought the other questions to the fore.
   - What protocol support audio and video needed - ST2 came out of the
   Wideband network -- there was work by Ferrari's lab in Berkeley -- several
   of the Gigabit networking projects  ran experimental conferencing
   protocols.  There was an app called "See You See Me" (but spelled with
   Cs).  Much fussing about how to deal with queuing delays, which led to
   IntServ and DiffServ working groups in IETF.  And since trying to send only
   one stream of video (for many parties) was clearly a win at the time,
   multicast was part of the party.
   - How to persuade video to deal with occasional loss.  Dave Clark did
   early outreach to codec experts and said that in response to the question
   "What do we do if some of your data has to be dropped" were told "Don't.
   We're good at compression and if the data could be dropped, we'd have
   removed it."  As I recall, it was Facebook that led to codecs that could
   deal with loss?

Van J's tools of Vic and Vat were developed in the early/mid 1990s on
DARTNET, a DARPA testbed to try to push experimentation forward on
multimedia transmission and multicast.

It was a complex evolution.  I remember talking with a VC person in Palo
Alto c. 1994 about the fact that at some point in the next decade we'd be
able to deliver movies over the Internet.  We spent about 20 minutes
running the numbers on storage, distribution points, licensing, etc.  It
all worked, but the number of problems (codes, protocols) that were not yet
solved was too high to consider creating a startup to run at it and hope to
catch the wave -- instead it was a fun conversation over a cocktail.

Craig
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