It may be hard to believe, but it’s been almost a quarter-century since the AV industry (along with broadcast and TV/film production) began thinking about routing audio, video, and control signals over the internet. At the NAB 1999 show, there was even an entire section of the Las Vegas Convention Center devoted to “streaming media.”
While those baby steps—remember the “dancing postage stamps”—failed to materialize into anything immediately practical and useful, they did show where these industries were headed. Today, AV signal distribution over fast IT networks is a matter of fact. Numerous improvements in video codecs, broadband speeds, and the widespread acceptance of video streaming to the home also helped spur this ongoing transition.
