Not that long ago, if you wanted to watch a movie at home, you’d have to dust off a DVD, pop it into a player, and wait as the disc spun up and the machine whirred to life. Streaming a movie? That was science fiction. And music wasn’t any easier: spin up that CD or carefully drop a needle onto your vinyl record.
Streaming was what happened in rivers.
Now we live in a world where you can press a button and watch almost anything you want in high definition. High-resolution audio? Also just a tap away. It’s all so seamless, but I find the technology behind it boggles my brain cells.
Let's go back a few years when the struggling internet kind of made sense. At least it seemed to.
Around the early 2010s, the average home internet speed in the U.S. was just 10 Mbps—fast enough for websites, email, MP3s, and low resolution video. But high resolution, 4K video? Not a chance.
A single minute of 4K video requires about 5.4 gigabytes of data—enough that downloading just one minute would’ve taken over an hour. Full-length 4K movies? Out of the question. Even with modern compression techniques, you still need at least 25 Mbps for reliable 4K streaming, far faster than most households had just a decade ago.
What changed? A whole bevy of simultaneous developments coupled with faster internet speeds.
Advanced compression codecs like H.264, and later H.265, allowed streaming services to shrink high-definition video into manageable sizes without sacrificing much quality. And adaptive streaming—pioneered by Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon—made streaming reliable by adjusting quality on the fly based on your connection speed. So even households with modest internet could watch without interruption, while those with high-speed connections could enjoy pristine 4K.
Music streaming followed a similar path. What started as lo-fi MP3s on Napster evolved to CD-quality and beyond streaming on Qobuz and Tidal with FLAC compression and faster cable.
These innovations wouldn’t have mattered without the infrastructure to support them. Fiber-optic networks, faster broadband, and 4G—and now 5G—made speeds of 100 Mbps or more common in homes. Today, fiber can reach speeds of 1 Gbps, making 4K video and high-res audio streaming instant.
All this still boggles my mind.
Each of us has a direct pipeline into the world's largest audio and video libraries and we each can listen to our musical selections or watch that movie—individually. Now, multiply that by millions upon millions.
My little brain cannot wrap itself around this achievement even though I understand the individual technologies used to make it happen. It's kind of like understanding all the bits and bobs of how a car works but still being amazed when you step on the gas pedal.
Good to sometimes marvel at where we are and what we can do.
