Summary
- Cord-cutting predates Netflix, as it capitalized on the shift towards the internet for TV viewing.
- Early streaming was poor quality but free, leading to the rise of online piracy for TV shows.
- The current streaming market has evolved, offering increased access, but it’s criticized for rising costs and commercialization.
Cord-cutting began before Netflix, as online piracy and streaming sites provided access to TV shows. Netflix’s success paved the way for the current streaming market explosion.
It’s strange to consider how much streaming has transformed the way we watch television. Netflix rewrote the rules in the early 2010s when it shifted its business from mail-order DVD movie rentals to magically streaming them to your home, to then creating its own original TV shows made exclusively for the service. The prevalence of Netflix signaled the age of the cord-cutters, where cable television was all but replaced by the then-cheaper convenience of streaming services.
However, the cord-cutting movement didn’t start with Netflix. The shift had been brewing since the 2000s, and Netflix merely capitalized on a growing market of those who favored the internet over cable TV. IN this article, we’re going to take a look at the age before Netflix and the rise of cord-cutting when it was still a fresh new idea.
When Streaming Was An Experiment
When the internet was a sluggish information superhighway at the start of the 21st century, video streaming was … chunky. Watching most things required much buffering and waiting. And when you did get video to stream, it’d often be badly pixelated and with garbled audio that sounded like it was coming out of a tin can. The early 2000s served as a testing ground to determine the viability of streaming, even when the quality was incredibly low.
This led to several services attempting to stream media for free. These ranged from the teen-friendly online broadcasting network of Sputnik 7 to the Cartoon Network Toonami offshoot called Reactor. You didn’t have to pay for these services, and you didn’t have to deal with video ads. The only thing it cost you was your time (because of all the buffering) and whatever you were paying for your internet connection.
An Adult Swim Alternative
The first streaming experience I remember working fairly well was Adult Swim’s website, where you could watch episodes of its shows. Starting in the mid-2000s, internet connections were strong enough to watch an entire TV episode at decent quality and without a long wait for buffering. Not only would Adult Swim host episodes of their latest shows for free, but they’d also air new episodes early, where you could catch the latest Venture Bros. on Friday before it aired on Sunday.
Mind you, this was long before today’s streaming devices that can be easily connected to your TV. Back then, if you wanted to watch with your friends, as I did many times in college, you’d have to huddle around a desktop computer or use the outdated S-video cable to connect your laptop to your tube TV and hope you had some solid speakers for connecting an audio jack. It wasn’t ideal for watching TV shows, but it was free, legal, and the only way to watch at your leisure.
In 2006, I moved into an apartment with a college roommate, and we debated whether we should spring for cable. Given that most of what we watched could be found online, we decided against it. We got our news online, movies at the theater, and watched reruns on DVD. The literal cord was figuratively cut before there was a streaming service to turn to.
With this new mindset, streaming began opening doors that were previously shut. Premium-cable HBO shows, for example, were luxurious, but online pirating websites and the scrupulous restrictions of video uploading platforms granted that access, if you were savvy enough to hunt for it. With budget being an issue, it was an appealing prospect, and being able to watch on my own timeline played a role. I preferred watching Deadwood on my lunch breaks over keeping an evening premiere schedule in mind.
The pre-Netflix cord-cutting was not entirely ideal, though. Not everything was available online (even from pirate sites), and legit streaming websites were sluggish to load, with their varying quality and abundance of attached advertisements. There were limitations that distributors and studios would eventually notice and capitalize on the shared desire to shirk the cable package format.
How Far Have We Come?
It goes without saying that the streaming market has exploded since the end of the 2000s. Netflix went from being the streaming service that could load a decent-quality version of the Dolph Lundgren Masters of the Universe film to now being the exclusive home of the latest big-budget Masters of the Universe animated production. Every studio now wants in on this system, as the streaming services are less about who has the rights and more about which distributor has its own platform.
It’s easy to be aggravated by how the winds have shifted from praising streaming as a fertile frontier to condemning it for being more about companies capitalizing on technological migration. It’s a mixed bag, considering that subscription costs have increased, but access has expanded to make finding just about any TV show or movie less of a hunt. The pricing model was also more ideal, treating channels with an à la carte system instead of the expensive cable packages with no alternatives.
And it seems we’ve come full circle with free entertainment, too. A low-cost digital antenna was the only means of watching local and network television. Now you don’t need that, as various websites like Sling and Xumo let you watch broadcasts for free, which is also standard on streaming devices. The days of watching free reruns are very much alive on ad-supported services like these, too, like Pluto TV and Tubi, for example.
While I miss the old days of paying nothing to stream movies and TV shows online, I don’t miss the lack of video quality or cumbersome method of gathering around a desktop, laptop, or tube TV with low-resolution S-video input. Streaming has plenty of faults in terms of business and technology, but the experience has become far less of a hurdle over time. It’s a standard now, but don’t forget that it was once the wild west for those who favored their computer over their TV sets.