It was not until the late 1980s that consumer PCs had enough power to display streamed media. Up until this time, nonstreaming methods such as CD-ROMs were used.

1988: The base for the first practical video coding format, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithm, was developed for image and video compression.

1990: The first commercial Ethernet switch was developed by Kalpana, which was later purchased by Cisco Systems. This switch helped to create the first video streaming software.

1992: The first commercial video streaming product, called StarWorks, was released. It was developed for enterprise Ethernet networks and enabled MPEG-1 videos to be streamed.

1993: The Trojan Room coffee pot became the first livestreamed content with a webcam; initially put on the internet in 1991, this live picture of a coffee pot let others in the Computer Lab at the University of Cambridge in England know when the coffee machine was empty. This began the livestreaming of more and more virtual events.

Also, in 1993, the band Severe Tire Damage performed the first-ever music livestream. The band was made up of various engineers and computer scientists who decided to livestream their music.

1995: RealNetworks developed a media player capable of livestreaming a baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners. That same year, Microsoft developed the media player, ActiveMovie, which was the precursor to Windows Media Player 6.4.

1997: RealNetworks launched RealVideo, which was one of the first commercialized programs for video livestreaming.

1999: Apple released a streaming media format called QuickTime. That same year, President Bill Clinton participated in a presidential webcast held at George Washington University.

2002: There was widespread adoption of Flash-based players on different video hosting sites, such as Flash Player 6 or Macromedia's Flash Player. The early 2000s also offered improved protocol formats such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

2005: YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. It initially used a Flash-based player, but later moved to HTML5.

2007: The streaming platform Justin.tv was released. It would eventually become the popular Amazon-owned livestreaming service, Twitch.

2008: YouTube hosted its first live event, called YouTube Live. Today, creators who have more than 1,000 subscribers on their channel can livestream on mobile devices.

2011: Justin.tv moved its streaming gaming platform to a new site called Twitch. Just two years later, the platform had more than 45 million viewers per month. In 2014, Twitch was renamed Twitch Interactive and purchased by Amazon. Currently, Twitch has 140 million unique monthly users, according to Mediakix.

2015: Twitter acquired the livestreaming app Periscope. Facebook and Instagram also began acquiring and launching their own livestreaming services. The Twitter livestreaming service Periscope shut down on March 31, 2021.

2018: According to BTIG Research & Strategy, 2.5 million pay-TV subscribers cut the cord, hitting providers such as AT&T and Dish Network hard.

2020: Market and consumer data analyst Statistica predicted that the number of video on-demand viewers in the U.S. will grow from 143.3 million in 2020 to 164.9 million by 2025.

2021: According to business-to-business software search firm Findstack, the livestreaming industry is predicted to reach $70 billion this year and grow to $223.98 billion by 2028.

Popular video streaming services today include:

YouTube, in particular, has become such a massive video streaming platform that it is now, according to Forbes, the world's second-largest search engine, with up to 3 billion searches per month. As a search engine, YouTube is second only to Google. So much content is posted to YouTube that if someone were to try watching every video on the platform, they would fall behind more than 300 hours every minute. That is the equivalent of falling behind more than a week and a half every single minute.

Learn more about video livestreaming's growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.