In this talk we will go back in history and look at the very first protocols and systems developed for internet streaming. The venerable NVP (network voice protocol) and ST (Internet Stream Protocol, aka IP v5) protocols developed by Danny Cohen, Jim Forgie, and other brilliant engineers at MIT Lincoln labs in 1970s. We will discuss the key ideas introduced by these protocols (the concepts of sessions, available capacity assessment, rate negotiation between sender and receiver, data transfer protocols, the need for network-layer support for sessions, resource provisioning, etc.) and show how most of these ideas become incorporated in subsequent designs. Specifically, we will show how many ideas introduced in NVP and ST have eventually found their implementations in modern protocols, such as WebRTC, QUIC and MOQ.

The talk will include many historical pictures and some videos of those early pioneering systems build in 1970s. It will also try to explain why and what motivated these original developers to come up with all these techniques. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2024, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this in San Francisco. Learn more at https://demuxed.com