As you may already know, there have been many suggestions on how to display different forms of media on computers that dates all the way back to the early times of computing which was in the middle of the twentieth century. Although, there has been very little progress with streaming movies for decades this was basically because of the elevated cost and the lack of capabilities the computer hardware that was available. The academic experiments that took place in the nineteen seventies were able to prove the overall concepts of streaming movies as well as the feasibility of streaming movies.
The technical issues that movie streaming had, was being able to have enough central processing unit and bus bandwidth to actually support the data rates that were required and generating paths that were low latency in the actual OS in order to prevent buffer under run. Needless to say, the computer networks at the time were still limited and the media was normally delivered over channels that were considered to be non-streaming channels. However, in the nineteen nineties we saw a greater network bandwidth that was especially apparent in the last mile. In the nineteen nineties there was also an increase in the overall access to the networks especially the well-known Internet. During this time, there was also commercialization of the Internet and the beginning use of protocols and formats that were considered to be standard.
It was these advances that occurred in computer networking that was combined with home computers that were powerful and modern forms of operating systems that made streaming movies practical as well as affordable even for the ordinary customers.