Today in Technology History
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May 22
Exactly ten years ago, a full-length movie was broadcast on the Internet for the first time.
The movie was "Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees." The star of the movie was David Blair, who was also the writer, director and producer. He spent six years putting the movie together on a miniscule budget, taking bits and pieces of inspiration wherever he could find them, shooting it all on video.
The movie is so surrealistic that it's hard to describe the plot. The main character is a weapon designer who is also a beekeeper. Bees take over his mind and send him to unusual places, including to the site of the first nuclear bomb test, and later to Iraq. Among the quasi-celebrities who appear in cameos are William Burroughs (the "Beat" poet) and Clyde Tombaugh (the discoverer of Pluto).
The 85-minute movie first appeared in some theaters around 1992. Soon thereafter, a version of it appeared on the Internet, which in those days was then accessible mainly to the academic world. That first online version, the "WAXWEB," wasn't the original movie: it was an adaptation consisting of hypertext, thousands of still pictures and audio files, and hundreds of video clips. That version of the movie inspired communications theorists to discuss such subjects as "machine-mediated narration" and "spacialized fiction."
On the evening of May 22, 1993, the whole movie was broadcast on the Internet -- becoming the first full-length movie online. The movie had to be converted into black and white, and even then it was only transmitted at the paltry rate of two frames per second.
A decade later, all the technical problems of streaming video haven't been solved. But with thousands of movies and TV shows being transmitted online every day, the Internet is clearly no longer just a medium for fringe movies with cult followings: even though the big studios still aren't sure how best to use the Internet, they're paying attention.
Related links:
Scroll down this page to read the New York Times article describing the movie's premiere on the Internet.
Click here to read more about "Wax."
Although the WAXWEB site has been offline for three years now, you can see an archived version here.
Scroll down this page to read more about the movie "Wax" and the "WAXWEB," and what they mean for communication online.
The poet William S. Burroughs, who appeared in the movie "Wax," had an ancestor and namesake we wrote about last year: the inventor of an early calculating machine.
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