Called it… but it’s happening much sooner than the expected timeframe I originally mentioned about seeing where it would be, two years from now (or from back when I wrote that update in September 2021).
As predicted, Google is trying to salvage what they can, and rebranding that effort as Google Stream. And I know from other past projects they ended up doing this to, Stream itself will up morphing into other things where the dart will either hit a target, or miss completely where maybe two years from now, they will just completely EOL it (but not after having strung whomever is continuing to tag along). They did it with successful and highly used products like Picasa and Picasa Web Albums before they killed it with Google Photos.
White-labeling it will allow other players to try to monetize/find their own business model (while Google runs the actual service). Again, the challenge is the last mile leg and that is still an issue in the US when it comes to low latency service (and for this type of service, bandwidth is also paramount for high quality frame rates). I don’t see that ubiquity changing for the next few years (that’s why it is important for tech companies in places like Silicon Valley, to get outside of that bubble when coming up with ideas and designs).
