There were three dominant players: QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player. What do we mean by the terms players and plug-ins? In the early days, the battle in streaming (and in any desktop-video application, for that matter) centered on the players. Faced with all the options, and a desire to watch a history-making event, many first-time streamers I spoke to expressed delight at when they were able to watch the streams but frustration at the steps they had to go through to view that content. Record numbers of live streams from across the globe, many by new or infrequent viewers, meant that a large number of these viewers were also introduced to playback in a browser, which required a plug-in.
Last week's presidential inauguration was a good example of this. The move to browser plug-ins, added on top of the earlier availability of multiple standalone players is, at the very least, confusing to those who seldom think about the technology that we use every day, except when they really want to watch a key event. Yet these same technologies are new to those who have never watched streaming video and, perhaps, even new to someone who last watched a video in a Windows Media Player several years ago. After being around the streaming media industry for any length of time, one thing we often take for granted is technology advancements that we use-mostly for convenience sake-to do our jobs.