Beginning in 1881, Théâtrophone enabled subscribers to listen to opera and theatre performances over telephone lines. This operated until 1932. The concept of media streaming eventually came to America.

In the early 1920s, George Owen Squier was granted patents for a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over electrical lines, which was the technical basis for what later became Muzak, a technology for streaming continuous music to commercial customers without the use of radio.

The Telephone Music Service, a live jukebox service, began in 1929 and continued until 1997. The clientele eventually included 120 bars and restaurants in the Pittsburgh area. A tavern customer would deposit money in the jukebox, use a telephone on top of the jukebox, and ask the operator to play a song. The operator would find the record in the studio library of more than 100,000 records, put it on a turntable, and the music would be piped over the telephone line to play in the tavern. The music media began as 78s, 33s and 45s, played on the six turntables they monitored. CDs and tapes were incorporated in later years.

The business had a succession of owners, notably Bill Purse, his daughter Helen Reutzel, and finally Dotti White. The revenue stream for each quarter was split between 60% for the music service and 40% for the tavern owner. This business model eventually became unsustainable due to city permits and the cost of setting up these telephone lines.

Attempts to display media on computers date back to the earliest days of computing in the mid-20th century. However, little progress was made for several decades, primarily due to the high cost and limited capabilities of computer hardware. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, consumer-grade personal computers became powerful enough to display various media. The primary technical issues related to streaming were having enough CPU and bus bandwidth to support the required data rates and achieving the real-time computing performance required to prevent buffer underruns and enable smooth streaming of the content. However, computer networks were still limited in the mid-1990s, and audio and video media were usually delivered over non-streaming channels, such as playback from a local hard disk drive or CD-ROMs on the end user's computer.

Terminology in the 1970s was at best confusing for applications such as telemetered aircraft or missile test data. By then PCM [Pulse Code Modulation] was the dominant transmission type. This PCM transmission was bit-serial and not packetized so the 'streaming' terminology was often a confusion factor. In 1969 Grumman acquired one of the first telemetry ground stations [Automated Telemetry Station, 'ATS'] which had the capability for reconstructing serial telemetered data which had been recorded on digital computer peripheral tapes. Computer peripheral tapes were inherently recorded in blocks. Reconstruction was required for continuous display purposes without time-base distortion. The Navy implemented similar capability in DoD for the first time in 1973. These implementations are the only known examples of true 'streaming' in the sense of reconstructing distortion-free serial data from packetized or blocked recordings. 'Real-time' terminology has also been confusing in streaming context. The most accepted definition of 'real-time' requires that all associated processing or formatting of the data must take place prior to availability of the next sample of each measurement. In the 1970s the most powerful mainframe computers were not fast enough for this task at significant overall data rates in the range of 50,000 samples per second. For that reason both the Grumman ATS and the Navy Real-time Telemetry Processing System [RTPS] employed unique special purpose digital computers dedicated to real-time processing of raw data samples.

In 1990, the first commercial Ethernet switch was introduced by Kalpana, which enabled the more powerful computer networks that led to the first streaming video solutions used by schools and corporations.

Practical streaming media was only made possible with advances in data compression due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media. Raw digital audio encoded with pulse-code modulation (PCM) requires a bandwidth of 1.4 Mbit/s for uncompressed CD audio, while raw digital video requires a bandwidth of 168 Mbit/s for SD video and over 1000 Mbit/s for FHD video.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, users had increased access to computer networks, especially the Internet. During the early 2000s, users had access to increased network bandwidth, especially in the last mile. These technological improvements facilitated the streaming of audio and video content to computer users in their homes and workplaces. There was also an increasing use of sta…

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Advances in computer networking, combined with powerful home computers and operating systems, have made streaming media affordable and easy for the public. Stand-alone Internet radio devices emerged to offer listeners a non-technical option for listening to audio streams. These audio-streaming services became increasingly popular; music streaming reached 4 trillion streams globally in 2023—a significant increase from 2022—jumping 34% over the year.

In general, multimedia content is data-intensive, so media storage and transmission costs are still significant. Media is generally compressed for transport and storage. Increasing consumer demand for streaming high-definition (HD) content has led the industry to develop technologies such as WirelessHD and G.hn, which are optimized for streaming HD content. Many developers have introduced HD streaming apps that work on smaller devices, such as tablets and smartphones, for everyday purposes.

A media stream can be streamed either live or on demand. Live streams are generally provided by a method called true streaming. True streaming sends the information straight to the computer or device without saving it to a local file. On-demand streaming is provided by a method called progressive download. Progressive download saves the received information to a local file and then plays it from that location. On-demand streams are often saved to files for extended period of time, while live streams are only available at one time only (e.g., during a football game).

Streaming media is increasingly being coupled with the use of social media. For example, sites such as YouTube encourage social interaction in webcasts through features such as live chat, online surveys, user posting of comments online, and more. Furthermore, streaming media is increasingly being used for social business and e-learning.

The Horowitz Research State of Pay TV, OTT, and SVOD 2017 report said that 70 percent of those viewing content did so through a streaming service and that 40 percent of TV viewing was done this way, twice the number from five years earlier. Millennials, the report said, streamed 60 percent of the content.
One of the movie streaming industry's largest impacts was on the DVD industry, which drastically dropped in popularity and profitability with the mass popularization of online content. The rise of media streaming caused the downfall of many DVD rental companies, such as Blockbuster. In July 2015, The New York Times published an article about Netflix's DVD services. It stated that Netflix was continuing their DVD services with 5.3 million subscribers, which was a significant drop from the pre…

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