# 4-11-1994: It’s Alive!
Broadcasting was a privilege
In the early nineties, broadcasting live to the world was reserved for a select few. Television networks and rich corporations, with expensive studios, satellite uplinks, broadcasting licenses and regulators watching over every channel. If you wanted to reach an audience, you needed money, permission and approval. For everyone else, live broadcasting was simply out of reach.
Three friends and a wild idea
Meanwhile, in the vibrant do-it-yourself rock scene of Groningen, three friends - Gerad Harens (video wizard), Rudo de Jong (computer wizard) and Stef van der Ziel (media wizard) - were experimenting with computers, video and this new thing called the internet. They had bought a Mac with a video grabber card in 1993, so they could digitise the analog video feed from the crew that filmed concerts. They had a modem. Stef had built one of the first graphically designed websites, uploading audio fragments and video clips of local bands. It took an hour to upload a single clip, but who cared. Rock and roll.
“What if we could broadcast a concert live on the web?!”
One night at the bar in Simplon, between the beers and the crazy ideas, Stef shouted: “WHAT IF WE COULD BROADCAST A CONCERT LIVE ON THE WEB?!” Everybody started laughing. ‘Come on guys, you’re pushing too far, nobody has internet anyway!’ The friends laughed too. But it also made them more determined to try it. Who cared if it didn’t work. It would be fun. They made a bet for beer. (Story continues below these grunge style magazines, made by the same team)
Friday, November 4, 1994
They had prepared some scripts but had tested nothing. That evening was the test. Just do it. They moved their Mac computer to the Upstairs Bar in Simplon, a small stage typically used for local bands playing for friends, fans and family on a Friday night. They taped a phone line to the ceiling, from the office to the kitchen next to the stage. The band rehearsed. And then the band started to play. Really loud.
How it worked
A video feed went from the video crew’s analog Panasonic video mixer into the Apple Mac Performa 630’s video grabber card, capturing really small JPG files - around 200×150 pixels - to the hard drive. A local script repeatedly uploaded the latest JPG as fast as it could through the 28.8K modem to a web server, using FTP.
The web server ran the latest Netscape server software, which had just introduced HTTP Keep Alive: instead of opening and closing a new connection for every single object, a browser could now keep the connection open. And instead of embedding a JPG, they put a CGI script in the <IMG> tag, telling the browser to constantly refresh just the image, as fast as it could. Load, reload, load, reload. The technique was later called server-push-jpg and became popular with webcams.
The first browser to implement HTTP Keep Alive was Netscape 1.12 beta for Mac, released just days before.
It’s alive!
Live images, auto-refreshing inline. Just 200×150 pixels. One, maybe two frames per second if you were lucky. No audio - which is quite important if you want to broadcast a concert. And just four viewers, they saw magic: a live stream of images. Which is basically what video is. And it was live, on the World Wide Web, for the first time, and ready for anyone to watch right there in their browser, without any restrictions.
Why four viewers changed everything
Technically, it was not that great. But something fundamental had shifted that night. For the first time, a live video broadcast had reached viewers over the open web - available, in principle, to anyone in the world with a connection. No satellite uplink. No broadcasting license. No network executives deciding what was worth airing. No specific software needed. No closed multicast. No regulator, no gatekeeper, no censor. No financial barrier beyond a computer and a modem.
There they were: three punks in a kitchen, behind a computer with a modem, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, protecting their ears against the extremely loud band next to them - doing what until then only the world’s richest broadcasters could do. Broadcasting live. To the entire planet.
The audience was tiny. The revolution wasn’t. If three kids could broadcast freely to the whole world, then anyone could. The technology would improve. The gatekeepers of broadcasting would lose their monopoly. This would rock the broadcasting industry.
From four viewers to billions
All the web had seen before was a static live image of a coffee pot in 1993. And people had experimented with live streaming on a multicast network. The Groningen crew streamed live video, on the open World Wide Web in 1994. RealNetworks introduced RealAudio in 1995, and RealVideo followed in 1997. Stef van der Ziel launched Jet-Stream in 2002. YouTube arrived in 2005 - eleven years after that first live stream.
Today, life without (live) streaming is unimaginable: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, FaceTime, Netflix. Anyone, anywhere, can go live to the entire world - no permission needed. There are now more subscriptions to streaming services than to digital television. That freedom to broadcast, taken for granted by billions today, was planted as a small seed in a small bar in Groningen, in 1994.
