“Streaming is probably the most profligate bandwidth consumer of the modern era”

Like Davey, I have my hobbyhorse subjects. Every so often he writes about the term “hacking”, and how he dislikes the slow evolution of that term from industry insider’s compliment to mass-media bogeyman label. For me, 2021 was the year “streaming” took a turn for the worse.

At the outset, it was something of a fake jargon term, loosely covering any delivery of media (sound as well as video) without an initial download to local storage. Mostly, the term would be thrown around when a sporting event, Royal wedding/birth/defenestration or record-breaking volcanic eruption made people extra-interested in seeing things unfold. Streaming was a sign that you were absolutely on the leading edge of the home multimedia revolution.

Then things started to get a lot more complicated. Both Facebook and YouTube will take the video captured by their phone apps and put it out on a web page that can have millions of watchers, be that “live” or after the event. This has been curiously slow to take off, an idea that seemed to have lots of fans in the upper reaches of the IT product design business, and almost no