OnlineTV.com Histories First To Broadcast Live TV 24/7

The very first Internet television network

Visit https://www.onlinetv.com and invest! This video was made by an OnlineTV intern back in 1999 and released in 2000. It features The history of live broadcasts on the Internet happening each night live from New York City and London along with Rick Siegel, the man who made it all happen. It shows the creation of shows at the famous Spiral Lounge, a top music dive at the time, as well as short clips of Mr. Siegel, back in the day, as he set up and recorded the bands. A historical short that shows what the leading edge of live video on the Internet was all about 5 years before Youtube came into existence. OnlineTV.com was 10 years ahead of its time.

Richard Siegel founded OnlineTV in 1996 to bring live broadcasts and archives to the Internet. Working with all the major players Siegel took his idea to fruition and played with several leading edge technologies of the time. The first broadcasts used a jpeg push with a separate audio feed. Later they switched to a Graham Technologies software being offered by Thinking Pictures which they called “Rockpipe.” By the time this video was made Siegel switched over to using Microsoft’s media player and broadcast technology working closely with John Maffei at Microsoft.

Rick Siegel and Yahoo

It was in 1998 that Siegel and Yahoo started to work out a deal to broadcast their first TV advertising over the Internet broadcast. It only took OnlineTV a few days to get the advertising inserted into the broadcasts and the adverts would play every 5 minutes. They were pretty funny and cool advertising and the people at Yahoo and OnlineTV.com was pretty happy. But word came down from the head office at Yahoo that the advertising had to be pulled as the contracts for the actors required $10,000 for each showing of the advert. Clearly a large hurdle was discovered as the advertising industry was just not ready for Internet broadcasting and their contracts would have to evolve into something else.

Digital Broadcast Rights for the World

The problem with rights organizations for the music being played took a lot of time to work out and overcome. OnlineTV.com did not have the funding to pay royalties or hire the accounting firms needed to take on this task. Instead Siegel came up with a genius idea – contract bands directly. The idea was that the group was right there at the time of broadcast and recording, doing the live performance, and could sign the rights to the performance at the same time. This allowed OnlineTV to broadcast, convert for storage, sync, change, compress, and do whatever it needed to broadcast the music and video to every nation in the world without having to deal with 100’s of rights organizations clamoring for fees which were just out of line with the number of viewers and income from the streams.