The Legend of Chuck the Movieguy
The Legend of Chuck the Movieguy
Your parent talked about him.
Your grandparents sang songs about him around the campfire.
Wilson Morales of Blackfilm.com introduces Chuck the Movieguy to newer online critics as “The reason we are all here” which isn’t entirely true, except it kind of is.
Long before the internet was all streaming services and free porn it was a text based interface with slowly loading still photos. You accessed this interface with a computer modem you connected to your landline phone.
(Long long ago before cellular phones you had a physical cord connected to your wall which in turn was connected to a bulky stationary telephone with no lights or graphics that you held to your face to talk when it rang and you had no idea who was calling because it would be 15 years before caller ID would be invented)
Hello? And the question mark is the big part of that sentence because it really was a question.
Who is this?
Who are you looking for? (Because your house only had one phone number for the whole family.)
It was text, it was audio and photos that would download and become visible as you watched and waited. And waited.
Downloadable video if you could find it was postage stamp sized, would take 45 minutes to download and had 8-10 frames per second.
Now Chuck the Movieguy was a geek’s geek. He had multiple computers, with dual 28.8K modems, first in line (because you couldn’t buy things online yet) for the 56K modem and happened to be living in the right place at the right time in Houston Texas when they started offering cable modem internet service with blazing fast 10-100MB internet speed. The great thing about this new service was the upload/download speed was the same. Unheard of at the time and you could connect your computer to this “always on” internet service and make your computer your own server.
Why am I telling you this? Its because of a company named REAL Video.
They invented a platform that you could download a real player application and if you had a real video server you could encode video, store it on your server and click on a link in your website page and it would trigger the video on your private server and buffer and “stream” the video to the person watching, as long as they had the real video player.
Now Chuck the Movieguy was a radio guy, living in Houston Texas with about 80-100 radio stations he would talk to and play his celebrity interviews which the movie studios gave him access to because of those stations.
There was only three kinds of media to the studios.
Radio, Print and TV with radio being the bottom of the birdcage to them. Online media was new and print only to the studios but rapidly growing as you can imagine.
Somehow someway Chuck the Movieguy got hold of a 500-connection license to a real video server (somewhere around nine thousand dollars at the time) and loaded it to his computer. That means that only 500 people maximum could buffer a video stream at a time.
He went to his friends at The Walt Disney studio (not quite just Disney yet) who supplied him with access to radio interviews with celebrities asked them if he could do TV interviews to run on the internet. There respond of course was,” How are you going to put VIDEO on the internet?”
(again, this was a long time ago)
I asked them to take a leap of faith and trust me and they did.
I encoded the video, put it on my real server and my friends at comingsoon.net put they videos links on their site.
For the next several months my server hummed at maximum capacity with me somehow getting a 1000 license upgrade along the way. It paved the way because soon
the internet started getting faster and HTML encoding started allowing you to embed video into your own server and stream it right on the page, no external player needed.
There is a lot more to his story of course, it involves many struggles, death, reinvention over and over again, his twin sister Carrie Keagan, Evil, deception, backstabbing from he who shall not be named and intervention from quite possibly a cross road demon.
But that is all story for another time.
OH and if you like Chuck’s shirt you can get it at ohiorivergraphics.com.
This site is a work of progress and watching the daily feed, liking and subscribing to it keeps the lights on in Chuck the Movieguy’s studio/man cave and sorry ladies/men Chuck is married.