About All-streaming-media.com and Stream-Recorder.com

All-streaming-media.com and Stream-Recorder.com web-sites has grown up from my hobby. I was trying to watch free video lectures of the University of California, Berkeley. I had very tight limits for the Internet traffic at the institute and my home dial-up connection was too slow to watch such streams. The only solution was to record a stream at a slow speed to watch it later on.

So I started digging how to do it and suddenly found a software called StreamBox VCR. It appeared that if I recorded the lecture, watched it and then deleted it, I didn't violate any laws. Many people outside the U.S. don't really care about laws related to the sibject so distribution of stream recordings by pirates is a great problem.

I was a web developer so after learning some new knowledge it was rather obvious to make a small web-page. It was a free web hosting back then. And it appeared that many people were interested in the topic. This was new to me as well as for many other people so there were few other pages about stream recording. I can't imagine how much more efforts it would cost me to build a project like this from the scratch these days. I don't really think it would be possible.

After seeing some interest to a single page I started adding more and more pages about stream recording. In a while I bought a domain name all-streaming-media.com and started adding even more web pages.

There was no any forums back then. I was answering onto questions and requests by e-mail. Sometimes there were so many user requests that it was very hard to combine this work with 9 to 5.

Then the forum All-streaming-media.com/forum/ was added (It was transfered to the stream-recorder.com/forum/ later on after having problems with a web hoster). But people continued to ask questions by e-mail 'coz the forum had a few posts only and nobody likes empty forums. I was desperate in promoting the forum. I wanted to shut it down. I couldn't believe that it would become the most popular stream recording community and that I would be looking for people to hire to work on these projects.

The recorded video lectures helped me to learn the language. I'm not a native English speaker so it was not very easy to build a web-site for the English speaking community. And this web-site is in English only, there are no any translations.