Page 333 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Onl ne D g tal F lm and Telev s on

key historiCal deVeloPMents
May 1975: Sony launches Betamax for home video in Japan.
October 1985: Blockbuster Video opens its first store and enters the existing video
rental business. Within the next year, the company grows into a multibillion dollar
international video rental chain.
January 1988: Sony concedes defeat of its Betamax line and begins production of
VHS recorders.
December 1996: Macromedia releases Flash 1.0.
February 1997: RealVideo debuts as part of RealPlayer 4.0, the first streaming video
application offered by the company, Progressive Networks.
August 1997: TiVo, Inc. is created and in a year releases its first trial boxes.
April 1998: Netflix begins operations.
January 2000: Homestar Runner debuts as an online Flash cartoon.
2001: Comcast launches its first rollout of Digital Cable On-Demand over the course of
the year. The rollout continues across North America over the course of several years.
February 2005: YouTube is created.
July 2005: FCC reports that subscribership to high-speed services for Internet access
increases by 34 percent in 2004 to 37.9 million lines in service.
December 2005: “Lazy Sunday” is aired and is spread virally through YouTube. Hits exceed
5 million by February 2006.
June 2006: “Lonelygirl15” debuts on YouTube.
November 2006: Google finalizes the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion of Google’s
stock.
December 2006: NBC releases “Dick in a Box” on YouTube. Hits exceed 20 million by
spring 2007.
March 2007: Millward Brown survey reports Flash reaches 97.3 percent of Internet-
connected PCs.

CuLTuraL anD BusinEss PraCTiCEs
The cultural practices that drive many of the above business models and tech-
nological innovations also mutate as services and restrictions are delineated by
the various industries. Many user communities celebrate the opportunities to
connect with media content and other users, opportunities that are not available
in movie theaters or on television. For example, fans of old European movies can
share their copies through peer-to-peer file sharing sites, diasporic Asian com-
munities can watch the most recent television episodes from their homelands
through bit torrent, and viewers from different countries can share international
shows within a browser (from Turkish news on YouTube to South Park on Comedy
Central.com). Many of these practices that have brought users together and com-
munities closer to their homelands are opposed by media corporations because of
the unmeasured or pirated nature of the shared media and consumption.