The Summer of Streaming Love: Will 网飞公司 Take Over the World?

场景是1967年左右的旧金山. 整个城市，乃至整个半岛, from the creek-side caravans in Menlo Park to the halls of the Stanford 研究 Institute—a free-flowing feeling of love permeates air thick with smoke and tension.

在一个折衷的政治混合中, 锅, 还有大量警力, a number of researchers were crafting the next generation of media delivery. 从超文本和输入设备, researchers such as Douglas Engelbart were laying the foundation of what would become both the worldwide web (our WWW of dot-com proportions) and the graphic user interface (which would require Engelbart’s mouse, debuted the next year in The Mother of All Demos).

泰德•尼尔森, 谁创造了“超文本”这个词,67年夏天尤其忙碌, although he was closer to another hippie enclave on the other side of the nation in Providence, R.I. Nelson jointly crafted the Hypertext Editing System, HTML的前身, 以及研究员安德烈斯·范·达姆, who was a co-founder of what is known today as SIGGRAPH, 计算机图形学会议. Van Dam helped steer his students toward the creation of XML and other web standards that the streaming industry uses to power its own revolution.

快进到2016年. It appears some of the content being streamed this summer may have a shot at shattering a few records.

Whether it’s video (including the upcoming Rio 2016 Summer Olympics, 将于8月开始播放. 5) or music (including the record-shattering run of Drake’s new album, 的观点, which was streamed 245 million times in its first, Apple Music独家一周), an eclectic mix of streaming options continues to drive the media revolution.

的联合创始人兼首席执行官阿隆 Qwilt, calls part of this trend “skinny love,” or the year of the skinny bundle. He’s referring to OTT taking the place of cable bundles. The unbundling of cable channels was supposed to start almost 20 years ago, as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Viewers would be offered the chance to pare down their cable channel diet from an average of almost 200 channels to a package of less than 20 that they would actually watch.

这又是一个时代的标志, Maor和其他人注意到了什么, 是OTT平台的同质化吗, 至少从营销的角度来看是这样. Let’s call this the 网飞公司-ification of internet TV.

In some ways, 网飞公司-ification is similar to the YouTube-ification of enterprise video platforms. 几年前, trying to chase the success that user-generated content (UGC) sites such as YouTube had found, almost every enterprise streaming service platform proclaimed itself the YouTube of Enterprise. The resulting plethora of UGC platforms only served to create confusion.

The same may be true for the 网飞公司-ification of internet TV—whether it’s the 网飞公司 of Africa, 中国, 或印度, 正如一些人已经预测的那样. It may be that 网飞公司 hasn’t gained a foothold in those continents or countries.

也许, though, we’ll see a consolidation of the world under the 网飞公司 spell. Some estimates peg the company’s subscriber base as more than doubling from 2015 to 2020. An estimated 75 million 网飞公司 subscribers were active users of the streaming service at the end of 2015, “fueled by aggressive international expansion of its streaming service, 提高宽带普及率, and a growing library of content that caters to different audiences across the world” according to James Wang, ARK投资分析师.

“The primary drivers will be growth in 中国 and other developing countries,” says Wang.

也许, in a not-too-distant Summer of (Streaming) Love, 我们会看到netflix的, 好吧, 网飞公司.

当然，这些都不是免费的. And there’s a significant amount of work still to do to scale out the internet-as-we-know-it limitations to be able to truly provide live linear television. 但迹象是存在的, just like they were at the Human Be-In months before crowds of hippies descended on the streets of San Francisco, 她们的头发上满是鲜花.

This article originally ran in the July/August 2016 issue of 流媒体杂志 叫做“爱的夏天”.”