>What are you even talking about? If you click on a YouTube link, a video your computer has never seen before is playing in less than five seconds, streaming over the internet.
Nothing about this is "web" specific. That's just "streaming over the internet" as you said. Lots of native apps do it too (for both music and video, internet radio, iTunes video rentals, etc.). The reason we didn't have this as widespread before was limited bandwidth connections (a limitation of internet, not of being native).
>You can instantly seek to any part of the video, even if it hours long. You can speed it up to 2x, or slow it down to 0.25x, without changing the pitch of the sound. If you have a Chromecast, you can display the video on your TV instead. Nothing in 2000 had a remotely similar feature set
Again, nothing about what you describe is web specific. Native can do it all and do it better and with less battery crippling cpu usage.
And nothing described -instant seek, pitch shifting with retime, etc- was impossible in native video players in 2000 (or even 1995), while all of it was impossible for the web in 2000.
Which also means things possible for native apps now are impossible for web apps now, which makes sense since native is a superset of what functionality is available in a web sandbox, and with faster potential speed. (And of course being web is not a requirement for accessing internet resources).
> You were saying that YouTube is a slower and clunkier version of a 2000 native app.
You said: "Nothing in 2000 had a remotely similar feature set."
Not that Winamp 3 (released in 2002) was a svelte piece of software[0], but it could do realtime pitch/speed shifting and stream audio and video from the Internet. With a sufficiently fast connection, three seconds from link click to video stream start would be quite doable.
Streaming and decoding audio and video isn't anything new. The two new things that The Web brings us are "zero-install" and a the benefits of the large amount of sandboxing work that's been put into the major browsers.
[0] WA3 was slow because of the UI code, not because of the media stream and decode code. :)
Nothing about this is "web" specific. That's just "streaming over the internet" as you said. Lots of native apps do it too (for both music and video, internet radio, iTunes video rentals, etc.). The reason we didn't have this as widespread before was limited bandwidth connections (a limitation of internet, not of being native).
>You can instantly seek to any part of the video, even if it hours long. You can speed it up to 2x, or slow it down to 0.25x, without changing the pitch of the sound. If you have a Chromecast, you can display the video on your TV instead. Nothing in 2000 had a remotely similar feature set
Again, nothing about what you describe is web specific. Native can do it all and do it better and with less battery crippling cpu usage.
And nothing described -instant seek, pitch shifting with retime, etc- was impossible in native video players in 2000 (or even 1995), while all of it was impossible for the web in 2000.
Which also means things possible for native apps now are impossible for web apps now, which makes sense since native is a superset of what functionality is available in a web sandbox, and with faster potential speed. (And of course being web is not a requirement for accessing internet resources).