The Night We Put the Internet on Television
In the summer of 1996, my team at CNN Interactive produced what was, to our knowledge, the first commercial internet video webcast. We covered the Presidential conventions — both of them — live, streaming video over a medium that most of our audience accessed through a 28.8k dial-up modem. To put that in context: 28.8k means 28,800 bits per second. A standard definition video stream today runs at roughly 200 times that. What we were delivering was small, blocky, and buffered constantly. It looked like watching a news broadcast through a keyhole in a fogged-up window. We thought it was the most remarkable thing in the world. ...