How does streaming work? – words Alan Woods

Netflix has become a global broadcasting phenomenon, with 93 million users in 190 countries streaming 11 billion hours.

The service has disrupted the monopoly previously held by TV networks, capitalising on the wider availability of high speed internet connections to ensure customers can rely on this as a service to feed their TV and film needs.

But it isn’t just Netflix that has made use of the power of streaming. Services such as Amazon Prime aim to rival its dominance in this field – while the numbers of people watching videos on YouTube prove that it also deserves to be seen as an influential broadcaster. Most of us use online videos websites.

In the old days of streaming media — the mid-to-late 1990s — watching videos and listening to music online wasn’t always fun. In fact it was a bit of a nightmare. Sort of like trying to watch a kettle boil or something – it took so long and was so frustrating it was a wonder anyone even bothered. It was a little like driving in stop-and-go traffic during a heavy rain. If you had a slow computer or a dial-up Internet connection, you could spend more time staring at the word “buffering” on a status bar than watching videos or listening to songs. On top of that, everything was choppy, pixilated and hard to see.

Streaming video and audio have come a long way since then. We now have 4g routers, satellite internet and internet services that can keep up.

So how does streaming work? This infographic from 100TB explores the science behind streaming – and the huge amount of data that is accessed when the biggest new shows or vlogs are released to an eager public…