# 25 Years Streaming

> The story and the award-winning rockumentary "Ready Set Rock 'n Roll" about the world's first live video stream on the World Wide Web, produced on Friday November 4, 1994 at the Upstairs Bar in Simplon, Groningen, The Netherlands.

## Key facts

- The first live video stream on the World Wide Web was produced on November 4, 1994 in Simplon, Groningen, The Netherlands.
- It was produced by Stef van der Ziel, Gerad Harens and Rudo de Jong.
- Technology used: an Apple Mac Performa 630 with a video grabber card, a 28.8K modem, FTP uploads of small JPG frames, and server-push JPG via a CGI script, viewed in Netscape 1.12b for Mac (the first browser with HTTP Keep-Alive).
- The stream had 4 viewers and roughly 1-2 frames per second at 200x150 pixels, without audio.
- The band that played that night was The AMP, a band from Friesland and Groningen.
- This predates RealAudio (1995), RealVideo (1997) and YouTube (2005).
- From 1995 onward, concerts at Eurosonic Noorderslag in Groningen were live streamed, with 8 simultaneous streams from 1996-1997.
- Stef van der Ziel later founded Jet-Stream (jet-stream.com), a European streaming/CDN company.
- The rockumentary "Ready Set Rock 'n Roll" (25 min, 2019) by directors Alex Pitstra and Koen de Koning tells this story. It premiered on November 1, 2019 in Simplon, Groningen, and was awarded Best Commissioned Film in February 2020.
- The page "What it looked like" replays the original 200x150 pixel JPG frames grabbed that night, simulating the 1-2 frames per second experience at 14.4K and 28.8K modem speeds.
- The same team also produced grunge style magazines in the early nineties; scans are on the page.
- The full English transcript of the film is published on the page (collapsible "Transcript of the film" under the video) and in the VideoObject structured data.
- The film is free to watch and licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. It is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GLdBP6kPOY

## Main page

- [Homepage with the film, a simulation of the 1994 webcast, the full 1994 story, premiere photos, credits and magazine scans](https://25yearsstreaming.com/)