57 years ago (1969) meant the only tapes were audio (8-tracks, reel to reel, and some cassette tapes), and those were just starting to become popular because Dolby (released in '65) was slowly starting to be used during mastering to reduce tape hiss enough that they could be used for music.
My grandpa recorded absolutely everything on VHS in the 90s. He had so many bookshelves full of movies and shows he meticulously catalogued. I wanted to ask him if he ever actually watched any of them, but I didn’t want to break his spirit.
This gif is perfect, I was listening to a song, then it finished and went to the next one, and in both his punches were completely synced to the beat both times
I mean, any YouTube creator is neck-deep in streaming. It's probably more unhealthy than long-form TV.
EDIT: Though to this influencer's credit, she seems more low key and avoids other social media. It appears she only does YT, Patreon, Ko-Fi, Peertube(!) and her own site, and uploads on a modest scheduile. That's quite reasonable.
Honestly super big props to this influencer for uploading a video about cutting out all streaming services 37 years before Netflix even started trying to pivot towards internet streaming!
Streaming music was available back in the 1970s. It consisted of you and your friends sitting on the floor with an AM radio and a portable cassette recorder and hoping the local station would play your song you wanted to hear and record. And IF your timing was right, you could get the whole song recorded. All so you could play it back on that cheap tinny sounding recorder. Such recordings were often used as a gift to your latest girl/boy friend with "Our Song" on it.
First, yes I'm bloody old. I had a small and cheap transistor radio mid/late the late 1960s. I got it for Christmas and I listened to it at night before I went to sleep. We had a much bigger multi-band transistor radio they kept in the kitchen that was a fancy one that was dual power. Batteries were expensive and often hard to afford as a kid. I do remember trying to make those batteries last as long as possible. Because we only went to town once a week sometimes even only twice a month. But the things I heard and learned about if the air was right and the am skip was good, and I could find those far distant stations was wondrous to a child.
We did have a cassette tape recorder by 1972 at the latest. It wasn't that me and my sisters each had a recorder, we just had the one for the whole family. And I can remember arguing about who got to use first-- me or my sisters. Kind of like the old RCA black and white tube TV. And most families had one. I can remember my Grandfather using it to record Polka and waltz music that he played and some voice stories of his early life. When he died in 1973 I was given a box of dozens of cassettes he had recorded telling those stories and him playing his banjo. Sadly he tapes have long since been worn out.
Thanks for the memory prompt! Those times were often hard at the moment, but for each one of those there is an equally good memory of family and friends over shadowing them. You made my tea taste better this morning.
You could stream 144p6 video with phone-like audio with a RealPlayer browser plugin and a 28k modem in 1998. Very few websites served video but some TV channels were available live like this, maybe also in 240p15 at double the bitrate with a luxury 56k modem or ISDN. Viewers with slower modems could often download such videos as VODs (depending on copyright because those didn't have RealPlayer DRM) as WMV (with Microsoft's proprietary codec better than MPEG-2) or AVI (as MPEG-2 so you could burn it onto a CD and view on a DVD player but it's unlikely you'd have a big disk and CD burner but processor too slow for that video). DVD-quality video (high bitrate 480p30/480i60/480p24/576p25/576i60, now considered low-end for movies) only became available to stream about 10 years later.
In 1970, I'd get home from kindergarten and watch Mr. Rogers in B&W. My mom didn't like color TVs for a long time because the colors were "wrong"--she was an artist, a painter. So, we didn't have a color TV till the mid-70s when she saw a Sony TV and decided the color was okay.
EDIT: I don't like that Lemmy is changing my double hyphen (--) to an en-dash. I guess I'll need to escape it from now on. I don't like being tagged as AI, when I'm clearly just an old-school non-AI bot.
There was something called a rotary telephone and TV with an antenna. Children were typically used as the remote control to change the channel using a dial or buttons on the TV.
Also kids being the first to run into the house and turn on the TV because it had to warm up. You needed to have it up and running before your show came on because if you missed it you weren't gonna see it until reruns. Now it has occurred to me the term rerun is obsolete
I cut all streaming services out of my life last year, except for Curiosity Stream, a sort of "Netflix" for educational documentaries.
But I haven't even been watching that in a while, so maybe I should stop paying for it.
I just got sick of rising prices and invasive ads despite paying to avoid them. I use Plex now. I paid the one-time fee for the Lifetime Plex Pass and now I have access to all their advanced tools and streaming content, plus I can rip my movies/TV shows/music to my PC and stream them myself through Plex. No ads, no extra junk, no "are you still watching?" pop-ups. Just hit play and enjoy.
They still are. I get 50 channels OTA and I have a DVR to record them if I need to. I stream nothing but my own media off Plex. All this costs me $0/mo.
I know its a bit off topic but at least in Australia all the free to air channels have their own app and if you have them all its a not insignificant selection.
A decent “no logs” VPN + thepiratebay.org, or Streamio + realdebrid has solved just about every media issue I’ve had.
Most of the time it’s easier just to open Streamio than search through 8 apps for what I want to watch only to find it gated behind a $65/mo. add on subscription, or not at all.
Mainstream app streaming has gotten worse, and open source streaming has gotten wildly easier.
Been self hosting my own content since Netflix removed King of the Hill. Cancelled my sub immediately.
For the most part I was doing everything manually with a seedbox, SFTP, and then renaming things.
Just scrapped that setup and did a docker environment with gluetun, qbit, and some *arr apps. Pretty good so far, some annoyances, but was a bit easier than I expected.
Kodi is dated and barely works and jellyfin lacks basic features. I have both jellyfin and plex, I prefer Plex but I have my own server with lifetime bought for $50
Well maybe. But I value the absence of needing any online service and hackability way more. Also for me, Kodi works perfectly. I have one on each TV, laptop, tablet, all synced. All I need is to open a torrent file from anywhere. But I admit, I have a hairy setup.
You can self host Plex and it has more developed features than jellyfin. Sadly, Plex needs a subscription and it's only worth it if you buy the lifetime on a flash sale.
I have a very organized Plex server that utilizes as much features as I can, and Jellyfin just lacked a lot of that. Basically that 10% missing is what I want. It's not bad, if I was to redo everything from the ground up it'd be Jellyfin or Plex, but definitely not Kodi like suggested above.
Edit: I believe for me it was remote access ease of use by Plex that I use heavily.
Sadly, Plex needs a subscription and it’s only worth it if you buy the lifetime on a flash sale.
yeaaaaaaah, and thats a big nope. Why does one need a subscription or a lifetime lease when you supposedly can self host? Subscription is what brought us into this mess in the first place.
Edit: I believe for me it was remote access ease of use by Plex that I use heavily.
Setting up a Wireguard / VPN isn't that hard, and cuts out unwanted Corpos as well.
There were huge antiwar protests and the National Guard shot a bunch of students at Kent State. But thank God there was no streaming TV. That would have been insufferable.
I wonder when I first started regularly streaming video? I remember downloading things to watch because streaming was too slow. Probably YouTube, but I don't remember when I started using it.
I think it was RealPlayer for me. I remember finding different sites and praying the connection was alright. That they were at least close enough in the world that you didn't see that awful word, "Buffering..." Then I learned how to rip the whole rt file. Pretty sure I still have Trigun in rt actually...
Then once Winamp had video streaming, I remember surfing through crap on there all the time. Sooooo many weird foreign movies and anime...
I lived in the middle of nowhere and my dial-up could only do 19.6k.
Good enough to "12/f/Cali sorry no mic I gotta TracFone with no minutes parents keep the house phone in their room cuz I got caught talking to guys lol"
And that's how me as a 14 year old boy paid for my cellphone with no job.
Yeah most people dont have the energy for those things, but its by design. Work and family takes all your energy. And then they want you to watch tv so you can get served ads, or watch news so you feel small and afraid.
57 years ago (1969) meant the only tapes were audio (8-tracks, reel to reel, and some cassette tapes), and those were just starting to become popular because Dolby (released in '65) was slowly starting to be used during mastering to reduce tape hiss enough that they could be used for music.
Betamax was released in '75, VHS in '76.
Umatic came out in 1971. But it was too expensive for most consumers. My brother in law had one because his family business was TV repair.
Uhm and what about Tapes for Data Storage? Pretty sure Mainframes existed in 1969 already.
I’m mean you had reel to reel. Which was a tape right, just not a cassette?
And Film/Movies/TV Shows were also distributed as Tape Reels.
I will give it a shot for the tapes my parents have in the Attic
My grandpa recorded absolutely everything on VHS in the 90s. He had so many bookshelves full of movies and shows he meticulously catalogued. I wanted to ask him if he ever actually watched any of them, but I didn’t want to break his spirit.
I live in a van near one (this generation's dream.).
I'd give anything for a steady diet of government cheese...
This gif is perfect, I was listening to a song, then it finished and went to the next one, and in both his punches were completely synced to the beat both times
on whom?
I mean, any YouTube creator is neck-deep in streaming. It's probably more unhealthy than long-form TV.
EDIT: Though to this influencer's credit, she seems more low key and avoids other social media. It appears she only does YT, Patreon, Ko-Fi, Peertube(!) and her own site, and uploads on a modest scheduile. That's quite reasonable.
Honestly super big props to this influencer for uploading a video about cutting out all streaming services 37 years before Netflix even started trying to pivot towards internet streaming!
I stream from self hosted sources, best of all worlds. No enshitification.
New media is acquired for free from the public libraries and then ripped, which under my local laws is perfectly legal.
Veronica is the best!
I wish I had a cool aunt like Veronica.
And so, are you *cue theme tune
That looks like a streaming video
Streaming music was available back in the 1970s. It consisted of you and your friends sitting on the floor with an AM radio and a portable cassette recorder and hoping the local station would play your song you wanted to hear and record. And IF your timing was right, you could get the whole song recorded. All so you could play it back on that cheap tinny sounding recorder. Such recordings were often used as a gift to your latest girl/boy friend with "Our Song" on it.
Hmm. 1970 is a little early for a kid to have a portable cassette recorder. Transistor radios were just getting affordable enough to give a kid.
First, yes I'm bloody old. I had a small and cheap transistor radio mid/late the late 1960s. I got it for Christmas and I listened to it at night before I went to sleep. We had a much bigger multi-band transistor radio they kept in the kitchen that was a fancy one that was dual power. Batteries were expensive and often hard to afford as a kid. I do remember trying to make those batteries last as long as possible. Because we only went to town once a week sometimes even only twice a month. But the things I heard and learned about if the air was right and the am skip was good, and I could find those far distant stations was wondrous to a child.
We did have a cassette tape recorder by 1972 at the latest. It wasn't that me and my sisters each had a recorder, we just had the one for the whole family. And I can remember arguing about who got to use first-- me or my sisters. Kind of like the old RCA black and white tube TV. And most families had one. I can remember my Grandfather using it to record Polka and waltz music that he played and some voice stories of his early life. When he died in 1973 I was given a box of dozens of cassettes he had recorded telling those stories and him playing his banjo. Sadly he tapes have long since been worn out.
Thanks for the memory prompt! Those times were often hard at the moment, but for each one of those there is an equally good memory of family and friends over shadowing them. You made my tea taste better this morning.
20 years ago…
You could stream 144p6 video with phone-like audio with a RealPlayer browser plugin and a 28k modem in 1998. Very few websites served video but some TV channels were available live like this, maybe also in 240p15 at double the bitrate with a luxury 56k modem or ISDN. Viewers with slower modems could often download such videos as VODs (depending on copyright because those didn't have RealPlayer DRM) as WMV (with Microsoft's proprietary codec better than MPEG-2) or AVI (as MPEG-2 so you could burn it onto a CD and view on a DVD player but it's unlikely you'd have a big disk and CD burner but processor too slow for that video). DVD-quality video (high bitrate 480p30/480i60/480p24/576p25/576i60, now considered low-end for movies) only became available to stream about 10 years later.
Even YouTube was around by that point.
Pretty sure Pandora was around. But also I'd consider cable and satellite TV to be streaming services.
It's not the technology it's the culture behind it. the same was said about TV. American mainstream consumerist culture is the cancer,
I still dont stream. I buy big hard drives and full them with stuff. :)
In 1970, I'd get home from kindergarten and watch Mr. Rogers in B&W. My mom didn't like color TVs for a long time because the colors were "wrong"--she was an artist, a painter. So, we didn't have a color TV till the mid-70s when she saw a Sony TV and decided the color was okay.
EDIT: I don't like that Lemmy is changing my double hyphen (--) to an en-dash. I guess I'll need to escape it from now on. I don't like being tagged as AI, when I'm clearly just an old-school non-AI bot.
There was something called a rotary telephone and TV with an antenna. Children were typically used as the remote control to change the channel using a dial or buttons on the TV.
Also kids being the first to run into the house and turn on the TV because it had to warm up. You needed to have it up and running before your show came on because if you missed it you weren't gonna see it until reruns. Now it has occurred to me the term rerun is obsolete
The closest thing these days are reuploads.
But it's funny, no more sitting through a block of something you don't like because your show is on next.
And fetch drinks, but you were expected to tip them
Tunes in a TV stream...
I cut all streaming services out of my life last year, except for Curiosity Stream, a sort of "Netflix" for educational documentaries.
But I haven't even been watching that in a while, so maybe I should stop paying for it.
I just got sick of rising prices and invasive ads despite paying to avoid them. I use Plex now. I paid the one-time fee for the Lifetime Plex Pass and now I have access to all their advanced tools and streaming content, plus I can rip my movies/TV shows/music to my PC and stream them myself through Plex. No ads, no extra junk, no "are you still watching?" pop-ups. Just hit play and enjoy.
They were called broadcasts back then. And the equipment you needed was a bit more expensive and bulkier.
They still are. I get 50 channels OTA and I have a DVR to record them if I need to. I stream nothing but my own media off Plex. All this costs me $0/mo.
I know its a bit off topic but at least in Australia all the free to air channels have their own app and if you have them all its a not insignificant selection.
A decent “no logs” VPN + thepiratebay.org, or Streamio + realdebrid has solved just about every media issue I’ve had.
Most of the time it’s easier just to open Streamio than search through 8 apps for what I want to watch only to find it gated behind a $65/mo. add on subscription, or not at all.
Mainstream app streaming has gotten worse, and open source streaming has gotten wildly easier.
I get frustrated even trying to pay for a subscription, only to find that I'm being gatekept at 720p/1080p for deigning to use my browser on PC.
Been self hosting my own content since Netflix removed King of the Hill. Cancelled my sub immediately.
For the most part I was doing everything manually with a seedbox, SFTP, and then renaming things.
Just scrapped that setup and did a docker environment with gluetun, qbit, and some *arr apps. Pretty good so far, some annoyances, but was a bit easier than I expected.
Plex?
nah. Plex bad. Kodi or Jellyfin
Kodi is dated and barely works and jellyfin lacks basic features. I have both jellyfin and plex, I prefer Plex but I have my own server with lifetime bought for $50
Well maybe. But I value the absence of needing any online service and hackability way more. Also for me, Kodi works perfectly. I have one on each TV, laptop, tablet, all synced. All I need is to open a torrent file from anywhere. But I admit, I have a hairy setup.
To be fair last time I used Kodi was like 2017, that was when it kept getting raided lol
Why use Plex (and relying on trusting them) when you can selfhost Jellyin?
@DmMacniel @Casterial any advantage on jellyin over emby?
yeah, that its the open source fork of emby.
You can self host Plex and it has more developed features than jellyfin. Sadly, Plex needs a subscription and it's only worth it if you buy the lifetime on a flash sale.
I have a very organized Plex server that utilizes as much features as I can, and Jellyfin just lacked a lot of that. Basically that 10% missing is what I want. It's not bad, if I was to redo everything from the ground up it'd be Jellyfin or Plex, but definitely not Kodi like suggested above.
Edit: I believe for me it was remote access ease of use by Plex that I use heavily.
yeaaaaaaah, and thats a big nope. Why does one need a subscription or a lifetime lease when you supposedly can self host? Subscription is what brought us into this mess in the first place.
Setting up a Wireguard / VPN isn't that hard, and cuts out unwanted Corpos as well.
A VPN setting up for a mother who has no technical experience and lives 3 hours away and a grandparent who's 80 and lives 2 hours away is indeed hard.
Most of my Plex was set up to cut streaming and cable on their end, I haven't fully cut streaming yet... 😞
There were huge antiwar protests and the National Guard shot a bunch of students at Kent State. But thank God there was no streaming TV. That would have been insufferable.
I wonder when I first started regularly streaming video? I remember downloading things to watch because streaming was too slow. Probably YouTube, but I don't remember when I started using it.
I think it was RealPlayer for me. I remember finding different sites and praying the connection was alright. That they were at least close enough in the world that you didn't see that awful word, "Buffering..." Then I learned how to rip the whole rt file. Pretty sure I still have Trigun in rt actually...
Then once Winamp had video streaming, I remember surfing through crap on there all the time. Sooooo many weird foreign movies and anime...
I lived in the middle of nowhere and my dial-up could only do 19.6k.
Good enough to "12/f/Cali sorry no mic I gotta TracFone with no minutes parents keep the house phone in their room cuz I got caught talking to guys lol"
And that's how me as a 14 year old boy paid for my cellphone with no job.
I remember watching South Park on RealPlayer...I guess it was streaming and I forgot! Yeah, that'd be my first time as well.
I almost forgot about the winamp video streams. I do still remember the 24/7 red Vs blue stream that was on it though!
There was a lot more fresh water back then so they were all rivers.
Underrated comment
But at least one of those rivers was on fire
Damn... Guess I'm 56 now.
Happy didn't exist either.
Still doesn't.
Exactly, it was gay!
She looks more like weird Al than Jack Black looks like meatloaf.
I guess people sit all day and stream stuff, because you cant do hobbies like dance, yoga, bicycle or anything else looool.
Yeah most people dont have the energy for those things, but its by design. Work and family takes all your energy. And then they want you to watch tv so you can get served ads, or watch news so you feel small and afraid.
work and family is excluded, for obvious reasons.
Thumbnail looked like Weird Al.
What about 1870 then?
Is that a young Weird Al?
No, that's Veronica. She explains things. Keep up
But can she explain how Big Earth has convinced people that the earth is round?