"Party Girl": 30 years ago, the first feature film was streamed live
On June 3, 1995, the feature film "Party Girl" premieres on the Internet. The age of streaming begins.
Leading actress Parker Posey herself presses the “red button” when a feature film is streamed over the Internet for the first time on June 3, 1995 – and it is even a world premiere. The event took place in a small office of the hosting company Point of Presence in Seattle. A few friends and colleagues have been invited to make it look like a party. NBC is also there – and honors the evening with a short TV report. “Cyberflix” could change the way we watch movies in the future, says the presenter prophetically.
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“This is very exciting,” says Parker Posey in her short opening speech, which is broadcast live in advance as a video – and she wants to encourage everyone to still pay 7.50 dollars for a movie ticket. Because the movie stream, which is attended by several hundred viewers worldwide, is free of charge. It is more of an experiment than a pleasure: the picture is only black and white, the resolution is 320x240 pixels, and only a few frames per second are shown.
1995: The WWW becomes popular
The time is ripe for such advances. If you had to name a year in which the Internet had its breakthrough, you would probably choose 1995. The web becomes commercial, the number of users and websites rises sharply. Shining star: Yahoo. Netscape goes public. Amazon, Ebay and Real Networks launch. And Windows 95 is getting its feet wet.
A series of feature films give the Internet space in 1995. “Hackers” (with Angelina Jolie), “The Net” (with Sandra Bullock), “Red Alert 2” (with Steven Seagal) or “Networked – Johnny Mnemonic” (with Keanu Reeves). Nevertheless, the first streaming film is one that has absolutely nothing to do with computers: “Party Girl”. After a wild night out, carefree Mary is freed from prison by her godmother. To pay back her bail, she begins to work in her aunt's library – and to question her superficial life of fashion and partying.
The idea for the online broadcast comes from SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival. The film is to premiere there twice: once in a movie theater and once as an online stream. It doesn't take long to convince the producers. While some are interested in the technical aspect, others are hoping for publicity. Especially for a film that only cost 150,000 dollars.
SIFF is already cooperating with the online magazine Film.com run by journalist and networker Lucy Mohl. She left television in early 1994 to devote herself to the Internet, and is regarded in the industry as a mentor for the Internet. She is the place to go when Werner Herzog, for example, complains about his IMDB entry.
SIFF sponsor Silicon Graphics, Apple, and a consulting firm from Los Angeles are coordinating the task. A location in Seattle with a powerful line from where the streaming is to take place is quickly found: The host of Film.com, one of the first hosts of Internet sites in Seattle, Glenn Fleishman's young company Point of Presence. The party takes place on his premises.
Video conferencing pioneer CU-SeeMe
The CU-SeeMe software (pun!), a pioneer in video conferencing on PCs, is used for sending and receiving. It was developed at Cornell University on the east coast of the USA and was released for the Mac in 1992 and for Windows in 1994. With CU-SeeMe, direct connections can be established between two computers (using only the IP or host address). A server, a so-called reflector, is set up for transmission to many recipients. Thanks to a 1.5 MBit/s T1 line, a server can be provided directly in the office, which is sufficient for around 100 viewers. Therefore, another reflector is sent to a college at the same time, which serves as a mirror.
Glenn Fleishman told heise online: “I remember how new and exciting it was to stream a movie over the Internet, even though the quality was so poor. It felt like the beginning of something. But I wondered if there would ever be enough bandwidth to stream TV and movies in high definition on demand. I doubted it, but I was proved wrong.”
Videos by heise
The broadcast – will, of course, be announced online at –. “The Party Is Just Beginning! Party Girl CU-SeeMe Live Broadcast”. And perhaps the theme of the movie does fit the zeitgeist. “A friend of ours called it the summer of love on the information superhighway,” Lucy Mohl told heise online. “Hosting the first movie online, knowing what it would look like at such a low bitrate, with all the jerks and everything, was exactly maintaining the attitude of the time.”
The film, released in Germany as “Crazy Party Girl”, is not helped by its role as an online first. It was overshadowed by the far more successful “Clueless” with Alicia Silverstone, which was released a few weeks later. In contrast, we all know how streaming has developed.
For the very precise: Back in 1993, the quirky indie mockumentary “Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees” was offered as a stream two years after its release – however, this was not a feature film, not a premiere and not live.
(mack)
