In The Beginning There Was Static: A Brief History of Video, Pt. 1

The text discusses the history of internet video from its analog beginnings to modern digital formats. It starts with Philo Farnsworth's image dissector camera in the late 1920s and moves on to the development of NTSC, PAL, and SECAM standards for color television. The text then delves into the challenges posed by digital video transmission due to bandwidth limitations and processing power constraints. It highlights the introduction of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) in the 1970s as a solution to these problems and traces the evolution of video encoding standards from H.261 to MPEG-4, H.263, and finally H.264 AVC. The text concludes by promising a discussion on more recent advancements such as H.265 HEVC, H.266 VVC, and streaming video technologies like HLS and DASH in the next installment.