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Entertainment all day
In the early days of online streaming media, watching videos and listening to music wasnât always a fun experience
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In the early days of online streaming media, watching videos and listening to music wasn't always a fun experience.
It was like driving into stop-and-go traffic during heavy rain. If you had a slow computer or a dial up connection you would probably have spent more time starring at the word 'buffering' than watching the videos or listening to music.
Streaming video and audio has come a long way since then. The success of streaming media is pretty recent but the idea behind it has been around for a long time.
Before YouTube, there was Metacafe, which was established in 2003. Today Metacafe specializes in publishing users' original content, and users can get paid for views.
Streaming sites have become more popular for music. As people are connected longer to through their phones or other gadgets, music streaming has become a huge businesses with artists reliant on sites like SoundCloud and Spotify.
Audio is an integral part of our lives with 21st century technology allowing us to experience music on a whole new level: it's not only easy to get a hold of your favorite music but it's easy to put your own music up there for the world to hear. One of my favorite music streaming sites is Grooveshark.
Users can listen to single songs from a choice of over 15 million, save playlists, and embed both on other websites, blogs and social media profiles via the Grooveshark widget.
Grooveshark also allows artists and record labels to promote themselves through advertising based on a slew of targeting and demographic data, getting their music straight into the ears of the fans most likely to love it. All data and analytics relating to an artist are available to promoters and the artists themelves, such as the number of plays, along with demographic and geographic information about listeners.
Sharing is the key word in Grooveshark as there are links to three main social media application: Facebook, Twitter and Google.
The mantra of this application's success is similar to democracy: It is made by the people, for the people. All content is user-sourced.
As movies and TV shows become increasingly accessible, it has likewise become increasingly difficult to keep track of what movies are available where, what is expiring when, and what is actually worth watching.
This is where movie streaming websites come in handy. My personal favorite is OVGuide, also known as Online Video Guide.
It is the world's first popular guide to video content and sites that, for the first time, allowed users to go beyond exploring video on a limited set of known providers. Keeping in mind it was only launched in 2006, it has opened up an entirely new world of video content for people who had only been exposed to a couple of sites, such as YouTube.
This truly is an amazing era for streaming technology.
The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post.
