Open Edge Series Introduction: The Foundation for the Future of Content Delivery

This four-part blog series explores the remarkable journey of video content delivery—from the golden age of television to the decentralized future of edge-powered streaming. As we trace this timeline, we’ll uncover how changing consumer behavior, advancements in internet infrastructure, and exponential growth in video quality have pushed content distribution networks (CDNs) to their breaking point.
We begin with the rise of broadcast and physical media, before diving into the internet-fueled streaming revolution of the 2000s and 2010s. Along the way, we’ll examine how the increasing dominance of streaming platforms, live sports, and ultra-HD content has fundamentally reshaped network requirements.

Most importantly, this series culminates with a deep dive into the Open Edge—a transformative approach that moves content delivery closer to the viewer. We’ll reveal how open caching standards, federated networks, and collaborative models between ISPs and content providers are redefining the economics, scalability and performance of digital media. Whether you’re a technologist, service provider, or content publisher, this series offers insights into how CDNs must evolve to support the next era of streaming, smart cities, and immersive real-time applications.

The Broadcast Era (1950s–1970s): One-to-Many Distribution

In the mid-20th century, television emerged as the dominant medium for delivering video content. In 1950, only 9% of American households owned a TV, but by 1960 that figure reached 90%.

Broadcast technology enabled one-to-many delivery: a single over-the-air signal could reach millions of TVs simultaneously, making events like the moon landing global experiences. This era set expectations for instantaneous, high-quality video delivery—but via analog airwaves rather than the internet. Importantly, adding more viewers did not strain the delivery mechanism; whether 1,000 or 10 million people tuned in, the broadcast signal remained the same. This would contrast sharply with the bandwidth-intensive unicast nature of later internet streaming, where each additional viewer creates a new data stream, increasing network load.

Home Video Revolution (1980s–1990s): Tapes and Discs

The 1980s introduced the VCR (Video Cassette Recorder), which shifted power to viewers by enabling time-shifting and personal content libraries. Adoption was explosive: in 1980, only about 1.5% of U.S. households (~1.2 million) had a VCR, but by 1989 over 62 million households owned one.

The VHS format (and to a lesser extent, Betamax) allowed consumers to rent or record video and watch on-demand. By the 1990s, DVDs replaced VHS tapes, bringing higher-resolution digital video and chapter-based navigation to home video. This era established the appetite for on-demand content and higher quality (DVDs offered 480p resolution, a clear step up from analog broadcast). It also foreshadowed the binge-watching culture—though “bingeing” in the 90s meant swapping physical tapes or discs rather than clicking a Netflix episode list.

Early Internet and Streaming Experiments (1990s)

As the internet emerged in the 1990s, the idea of delivering video digitally began as an ambitious experiment. Early connections were slow – in 1995, a typical dial-up modem was 28.8–56 kbps, making video playback painfully limited​. Watching a short clip often meant waiting for a file to download completely (or enduring tiny, low-resolution streams).

In these conditions, live streaming was almost unimaginable – yet pioneers pressed on. In 1993, a garage band named Severe Tire Damage performed the first live internet video broadcast using a multicast network called Mbone.  The stream was so novel that it reportedly consumed half of the Internet’s total bandwidth at that time.

By the late ‘90s, companies like RealNetworks introduced streaming protocols (e.g., RealPlayer with RTSP) to send audio and video over the web in real-time. Limited by dial-up speeds, such streams were postage-stamp sized and prone to buffering. Still, they proved the concept: the internet could be a medium for video.

The Rise of CDNs (Late 1990s)

As web traffic grew, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) were born to solve a fundamental problem: how to deliver content quickly to users worldwide. The first CDN is often credited to Akamai Technologies, founded in 1998 by MIT researchers looking to “leverage a network of servers…to optimize the delivery of web content”.

Instead of every user pulling content from a central server (which could be slow or overloaded), CDNs cached content on distributed servers around the globe. In the 90s, this caching primarily handled static files – images, scripts, and software downloads – to speed up websites. This innovation was timely: events like the “Star Wars: Episode I” trailer release in 1998 (one of the first major internet video downloads) demonstrated the need for better content delivery infrastructure.

By caching data closer to users, early CDNs reduced latency and prevented web meltdowns under high demand. Little did we know that this CDN concept would become the backbone for video streaming in the decades ahead.

Milestone – Internet Overtures to Television

By the end of the 1990s, all the ingredients for the streaming revolution were present in nascent form. Average global internet speed had surpassed 1 Mbps by 2005, roughly 20× faster than dial-up, paving the way for web video.

Companies like Netflix (founded in 1997) were leveraging the internet in other ways – Netflix started by mailing DVDs, but its very existence hinted that consumers were ready for more convenient digital delivery. In our next blog, we’ll see how the early 2000s took these threads—growing internet speeds, new consumer habits, and the CDN model—and wove them into the foundation of the streaming era.