A New Adventure, a New Book
- Craig Leddy
- Jun 11
- 3 min read
Announcing Fast Forward, The Inside Story of the Invention of Video Streaming
After years of writing countless articles and reports about media and tech, I decided to take on a new challenge: writing a book. After nine years of on-and-off research, interviews, and scribbling, I’m thrilled to announce the completion of Fast Forward: The Birth of Video Streaming, Media’s Wild Child. This nonfiction business book is due out in September from Koehler Books.
Fast Forward tells the inside story of the invention of video streaming and the media mayhem that followed. You might think streaming was invented by Netflix, Amazon, or YouTube. But long before those services existed, a team of innovators in the early 1990s was tasked with developing on-demand movie streaming, electronic shopping, virtual gaming, and other interactive TV services.
That team gathered in Orlando, Florida, to build the Full Service Network (FSN), a project spearheaded by Time Warner, then the world’s largest media conglomerate, led by its ambitious CEO, Jerry Levin. As digital technology took hold, these developers became foot soldiers in a fierce race between cable, computer, and telephone giants to transform television into an interactive medium.
Reserve a copy of Fast Forward and get a preview excerpt
Why television? In the early 1990s, TVs were in 98% of U.S. homes, while personal computers were in only 15%. More than half of TV households were connected to cable, which—at least in theory—could be used for two-way communication. The Internet was still in its infancy and wasn’t yet seen as a medium for entertainment.
FSN was the most ambitious attempt to build an interactive TV system, but the tools they had were primitive. Developers had to write most of the software code from scratch. Few movies even existed in a digital format. It was like being asked to invent a gasoline-powered car before there was gasoline.
Despite constant setbacks and culture clashes between TV engineers and Silicon Valley technologists, the FSN team pressed forward. Working without a roadmap, they reimagined television and developed a suite of interactive services for an initial rollout to 4,000 homes in Orlando. Time Warner planned to spend $5 billion on broader FSN deployments—equivalent to $10.4 billion today.
In December 1994, the developers staged a high-stakes launch event before a global press corps to unveil the first-ever on-demand movies and interactive TV services. Behind the scenes, the system kept crashing until the night before the big reveal. As Levin and Jim Chiddix, CTO of Time Warner Cable, prepared to click a remote and usher in a new era of television, the team anxiously awaited its fate.
An ambitious project launched on-demand movies a decade before Netflix streaming.
As a business journalist, I covered the rise of digital TV and the FSN project. I got to know many of the developers and followed their career journeys. Professionally and personally, they gained much from the FSN experience—many went on to become industry leaders.
I believed their story was worth telling. And for anyone working in digital media today, it’s important to understand where digital TV and streaming came from, along with the opportunities and challenges that still lie ahead.
FSN shut down in 1997, dismissed as an expensive failure. But only now is its legacy being recognized. Like Columbus sailing for the Far East but landing in the Americas, the FSN developers set out to create interactive TV and instead discovered the beginnings of movie streaming. Years later, with the web offering a more scalable platform, Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and others launched streaming services—and the wild child roared to life.
I had a great time writing Fast Forward and think you’ll find it a fun and enlightening read.
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