Streaming media

Streaming media is media that is controlled by the user to instantly push large amounts of data through internet lines for multiple users to view at once. This type of media was first introduced in 1995 when ESPN Sportszone used the web to broadcast a baseball game between the Mariners and the Yankees. One of the programs that was able to utilize web 2.0 was Macromedia  Flash Player. It had to be downloaded onto the system as a plug-in in order to stream videos. This technology was difficult considering mostly what was being used was 56k modems that couldn't handle large amounts of data at once. It was not until protocols like HTML 5 that made it possible to handle streaming without having to use plug-ins because the protocol worked with web browsers to manage these tasks. Nowadays larger amounts of data can be streamed in high definition. More information can be found here http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/mar/01/history-streaming-future-connected-tv
below is an image from Flickr of a program called Netflix which is widely used to streams a database of movies that is available through almost any computing platform.