History
Introducing " I want my MTV! MBone (and Multicast)"
Cuseeme 2000 - Multicast by opencu
The Internet is great, instead of just TV and newspapers we have a "back channel" - so we are able to "respond" immediately and "interact" in an entire network.
Also, it’s like a democratic network,anybody who can connect , may participate.
( First LIVE speech over cuseeme of an american democratic president , Audio1.aif, Audio2.aif , Audio3.aif)
How can I meet people that I don´t know ?
When you´re born in the 80´s and you might think Facebook with Skype ,or google+ with "hangouts" or ustream.tv, and chatroulette is cool, but there was something much cooler out there allready , no not IRC, it was called CU-seeme, but a difficult licensing tree, NAT and finally MJPG was the nail in the coffin.
The idea of "ip based realtime group communication" , beside of amateur radio , started 1988 with IRC (internet relay chat ), but there is no video or audio capabilitys, so we are following an older concept called : CU-SeeMe a multiconferencing solution , developed in the early 90's.
What was the problem with cuseeme ?
However; in the past years things changed and all instant messengers using the internet, regardless of their entry method ( jabber and voip applications using SIP or H323, skype and even e-mail) need to know the "adress", "ID" or Nickname of a "user" to get in contact with him/her. Even then, communication is mostly a one-to-one connection, and does not provide for broad community interaction and NASA NAT broke the rest and cuseeme endet up in closed source microsoft only application
( picture copyright by radvision.com )
The history of video conferencing (VC) technology 1956 - 2003
Live CU-SeeMe video from NASA Select coverage of STS 65
http://www.ludvigsen.hiof.no/webdoc/sts65.html
Even microsofts desperate attempts to get a foot into the door with Netmeeting , whitch never had multiconferencing abilitys, ended up in a netmeeting porn desaster and gave videoconferencing on the net a bad name.
The reading Room
The old clients for historical purposes can be found here
