In the mid-2000s, improvements to data speeds and broadband costs led to an explosion of first generation video streaming services. To get more news about moonlive, you can visit official website.

A group of ex-PayPal employees founded YouTube in 2005. Seeing the success of it, DVD rental company Netflix scrapped its planned streaming device and launched an internet-based streaming service instead.

Only a year after the launch of YouTube, Google acquired it for $1.65 billion. At the time, it was seen as an extravagant purchase, for a nascent technology which hadn’t generated any meaningful revenue. But, for Netflix and Amazon, it was confirmation that this market was set for spectacular growth in the next decade. Amazon launched Prime Video in 2006 and across the pond, the BBC launched iPlayer in 2007. All of the inaugural players were active, although it would take a few more years for recommendation systems to mature and revenue to generate.

In China, the earliest platforms had already begun operations before YouTube. Youku and Todou, the original pioneers of video streaming, launched in 2003 and 2005, respectively. It would be five years before Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu took an interest in the market.

Baidu launched iQiyi in 2010, which was the first foray into premium video streaming in China. Tencent Video came shortly afterwards, although until 2013 both were primarily focused on free, user generated content. A major turning point in video streaming came in 2013, when Netflix debuted House of Cards, its first original series. Until then, Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services spent almost all their content budget acquiring older TV shows and movies, which had already been released on television or in the cinema.

With this move, Netflix altered the power dynamics, by showing it could create quality content that millions would watch. In the next few years, it would launch some of the most popular TV shows of the decade, including Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things and Narcos.

Amazon would follow suit in 2015, with the launch of The Man in the High Castle and Mr. Robot. Even Hulu, a streaming service owned by the media corporations as a way to combat Netflix’s success, began publishing its own shows.

Netflix, encouraged by growing subscription numbers (60m to 110m in three years), has increased its content spend every year. In 2020, a Wall Street forecast projected it would spend $17 billion on content, up from $15.3 billion in 2019.

Film and TV studios have not remained static over the past decade. ATT (owner of WarnerMedia HBO), Comcast (with NBC), CBS and Disney have all launched streaming services to compete with Netflix. In the UK, BBC and ITV have launched online streaming platforms.

This has caused, at least in the US, Netflix and Amazon to be far more invested in original content for the future. Many of the most popular shows and films on Netflix, such as The Office, Parks and Recreation and the Marvel movies, have been removed in the past two years.

User generated content has had less of a fun time over the past five years. While revenue and usage has increased, YouTube has been accused of promoting harassment and disinformation, forcing it to change moderation policies to keep advertisers happy.

The introduction of TikTok to the Western world in 2018 also created a new competitor for YouTube, one which has over 400 million active monthly users in the West. US President Donald Trump accused the app of being a tool for the Chinese government and in September 2020, TikTok owner ByteDance was forced to sell its Western operation to Oracle.

Bytedance is one of the new wave technology companies in China, competing with the old guard of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. It operates Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok, which also has 400 million active monthly users, and Xigua Video, which has 270 million active users.