When YouTube was first launched in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, most of the world couldn’t even dream of streaming video from the internet. Rumour has it, the service was created out of rage – apparently, Hurley and Chen had trouble sharing a video with someone online, so they decided to build a service to help people do that. Of course, the story was neither Streaming confirmed nor denied by the developers.
Today, streaming is ubiquitous – most of our online entertainment is built around it. You can stream pretty much everything from music and movies to games at Bbin Casino Live and video games, even live concerts, webinars, and keynotes. The streaming services are built to work on a wide range of networks, from 3G mobile to the broadest broadband connections in the world. But where do we go from here? What does the future of streaming look like?
The broadband broadens further
The 5G network (not the 4.5G that many operators promote as 5G) is spreading around the world as we speak. With it comes the never-before-seen internet speed that the network is capable of. 5G will handle not only lightning-fast data transfer but also a very large number of simultaneous connections. And it will be needed, considering the ever-growing number of connected devices: there are already around 6 billion smartphones in the world, and their number will continue to grow in the coming years.
Increasingly digital entertainment
An ever-growing part of our entertainment needs is not taken care of digitally. We use services like Spotify and Tidal to listen to music, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to watch movies and series, YouTube and Twitch to follow eSports matches, and Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks to follow our favorite artists and other influencers live. Streaming is already expanding into shopping: live stream shopping is a trend started in China that’s spreading to the rest of the world that combines a review by an influencer with an opportunity to buy a product online.
Streaming will become an increasingly important part of the entertainment industry – especially if the pandemic stays with us for long.
Streaming in other areas
Streaming – and the fast, low-latency internet connection 5G will provide – can revolutionize many other areas as well. One of the areas where streaming will play an important role is telepresence. For those unfamiliar with the term, telepresence means using a connected avatar to be “present in two places at once”. Keynote speakers, for example, won’t have to actually be present on the stage while speaking – they’ll be able to send a robotic avatar connected to the internet. It’s a bit like a Zoom meeting where only one of the participants is at home.
Another area where technology using streaming will bring an evolutionary leap is medicine. In the future, patients will not have to be in the same room as their doctors – the specialists will be able to use high-definition cameras and sensors to take all necessary readings, and converse with the patient from half a world away. Remote surgery or “telesurgery” is already a thing, even if not widespread – its proliferation will be helped by 5G and the increasingly sophisticated robots used in medicine.
