Nowadays, it’s a common habit: if you want to watch a movie, you sit in front of the television, press a button, and you have an endless streaming catalog to spend two hours choosing what to enjoy. And then, maybe, watching what you choose if it hasn’t gotten too late. However, there was a time when going online and watching movies was crazy. You either went to the theaters, the video rental stores, or waited for them to air on TV with a thousand commercial breaks. There was no other option, right?
Imagine: Netflix started its video streaming tests in January 2007, after ten years of being an online video rental service (literally), and before it, there were only other small early attempts like iTunes, which allowed you to pay to download shows and series (and in 2005 it was an incredible novelty), Amazon Unbox (the precursor to Prime Video, in 2006) or, of course, YouTube, in early 2005. But, what if I told you that twelve years before the first video was launched on YouTube, a movie was already streamed? However, no matter how much you guess, you will never figure out which one it is.
And the little bee was called Netflix
Let’s look back to 1993, when Reed Hastings had just created his first company, Pure Software, and Jeff Bezos was just another person in an investment fund. Particularly until May 22, when a few computers -less than a hundred, certainly- gathered at night to watch the first movie ever broadcast on the Internet. Its name, Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. See? I told you that even trying for a thousand years you wouldn’t guess it.
After its release in 1991, this 85-minute video art film gained a certain cult following, thanks in part to the popularity of its director, artist David Blair. It became so successful that even after being shown in theaters in the United States (26 theaters, to be precise), it reached as far as Australia or Japan. It wouldn’t be an achievement for, say, Sonic 3, but it certainly was for such a small film with more intentions of being displayed in a museum than in a commercial theater.
Ah! In case you’re curious, it’s a critique of the Gulf War (and all wars, really) set in New Mexico, back in 1983, when a weapons designer inherits Mesopotamian bees from his grandfather. To showcase this seemingly disconnected madness, Blair mixed digital animation, found footage, and live action. And, of course, thanks to its cult success, it ended up appearing on VHS, at which point scientists took the opportunity to finally stream it completely free to anyone who wanted (and could) connect to the Internet. Remember, this was even before Windows 95! It wasn’t as easy as it seemed!
At Two Frames Per Second
To be able to broadcast it on the Internet, Blair himself had to remove all the color, add grain, make it blurrier, allow the audio to occasionally go mute… and reduce the usual 24 frames per second to just two. That is, two images were seen per second, preventing the human eye from making the connection between still image and movement. To do this, he used a film production studio in Manhattan, pressed “Play” on a VHS player, and connected it to a computer that converted it to digital, then showed it to the Internet.
Okay, yes, it wasn’t 4K, nor did it have Dolby Surround sound, nor, beyond the historical moment, was it something that most people really wanted to see. And not only did it happen, paving the way for the then-millionaire cable companies to go digital, but it gave a small glimpse of what the future was going to be, in the same way that those first televisions received crude live silent broadcasts of theater plays. Little by little.
It took another five years, until 1998, to see the first real video streaming service. It was called iTV, operated only in Hong Kong, cost 20 euros a month, and on a full weekend, it took 45 minutes to start playing hit movies like Batman and Robin. With these ups and downs, you can imagine what happened to them shortly after. Netflix was not the first, but at least it knew how to learn from Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees and other services that tried to capitalize on their success without much of it. And indeed, all past times were, definitely and although our nostalgia opposes it, a little bit shabbier.
