DivX, long the format of choice for online video, was not invited to the party. Early living room streaming solutions like Microsoft Media Extender and similar products from Apple brought media to the television, but unsurprisingly they tended to be proprietary, supporting only Windows Media or QuickTime playback, respectively. Once users embraced streaming video online, they naturally began to clamor for a way to get that same content to the television without having to burn a disc or plug in an external hard drive. DivX Stage6, the first video sharing site to offer HD quality, came to the market soon after, along with a number of other sites. A small start-up called YouTube debuted in 2005, quickly gaining traction with a diverse collection of user-generated videos that were just “good enough” in terms of visual quality to attract a large audience. Technologies like Flash enabled only grainy, postage-stamp size video quality, and dial-up and early broadband connections were not fast enough to support anything resembling a high quality of service.Īs technology improved and broadband became more ubiquitous, the streaming experience moved out from the Internet shadows. When streaming video first appeared on the Internet, the experience was far from ideal. Little did we all know know that, along with the end of boy band dominance and the introduction of Andrew Garfield … and later Tom Holland as Spider-Man, a streaming revolution lurked just around the corner… This was great as long as ‘download-and-play’ remained the dominant mode of media consumption for Internet video fans, which it did for many years. Soon, millions of DVD players and other devices were DivX Certified, making it easy for users to burn DivX files to a disc (you *do* remember burning to CD or DVD, right?) or USB stick and play it back in all its full-screen glory in their living rooms, a method some in the industry called ‘ sneakernet’. That all began to change in 2003, when the first DivX Certified® DVD player hit the market. Of course, once you downloaded a DivX file it essentially took up residence on your hard drive, as there was no easy way to play a DivX video on a television. The groundbreaking DivX codec first became popular in the early 2000s, a more innocent time when Mac computers came in bright colors, Toby Maguire was Spider-Man, and the best way to get high-quality video content from the Internet was to download it to your computer.
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