Microsoft NetShow

» see microsoft.com/netshow as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

netshow was microsoft's first real attempt at internet streaming. version 1.0 shipped in 1996 alongside iis 3.0, the same release that turned windows nt into a viable web server. by version 3.0 in mid-1998, it could do live and on-demand video to a windows-side player over a 28.8k modem, with results that were mediocre on a good day and unwatchable on a bad one.

the point of netshow was to take share from realnetworks. real had owned the streaming category since 1995, when they launched realaudio, and by 1997 their player was on every consumer pc that wanted to play a sound file off a website. microsoft saw the same opportunity and decided to bundle a competitor into windows itself. that was the playbook. it worked, slowly.

then in october 1999, microsoft rebranded the entire product line. netshow services became windows media services. the player became windows media player. the encoder became windows media encoder. the name "netshow" was retired across the board, four months before windows 2000 shipped.

i missed netshow entirely. by 1999 i was 15, on a 33.6k modem at home in ankara, and the kind of audio i was downloading came from napster and lived on my hard drive as an mp3. streaming was for people with faster connections and an interest in radio shows. by the time the bandwidth caught up to me, windows media was already the name on the player.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

netshow's growth came from microsoft's distribution muscle, not from technical superiority. real had a better codec and a better player. netshow had something real did not, which was operating-system level access. you could install iis on a windows server and netshow services dropped in with it. you could not do the same with a real server without buying a separate license.

~ what really happened ~

the october 1999 rebrand was not really a death. it was the same product, repackaged under a name that meant something to corporate buyers. "windows media" landed cleaner than "netshow" did. the underlying servers kept shipping inside windows server through the 2000s, then got folded into iis media services, then got slowly deprecated as flash and later html5 took over the streaming-server market. the last windows media services release was for windows server 2008.

~ the long tail ~

the netshow name still ships, hidden, on every running copy of windows. open a packet capture of windows media player making an http request and you will see "NSPlayer/12.0.x.x WMFSDK/12.0.x.x" in the user-agent string. NS stands for netshow. the brand died in 1999, but the executable identifier did not, because nobody had a reason to break compatibility with twenty years of server-side logs that filter on it.

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