Brian Cartmell

In the early-to-mid 1990s, live video on the internet was barely a concept. Bandwidth was thin, compression was primitive, and the idea of streaming real-time video to a browser was something most people in the industry considered years away from being practical. I didn't think it was years away. I thought it was possible right then, and I wanted to be the one working on it.

Internet Entertainment Group (IEG) was one of the few places in Seattle — or anywhere — where someone was willing to invest in building live streaming infrastructure. The company was founded by Seth Warshavsky, and in its earliest days, the draw for me was purely technical. I had the chance to work on something that almost nobody else was doing: getting real-time video to work over the internet at scale.

The adult industry was one of the only sectors willing to experiment with (and pay for) this kind of technology, which is a pattern that has repeated throughout the history of the internet — from payment processing to streaming to content delivery networks, the adult industry has often been first to adopt and fund technical innovation that later became mainstream.

But while I was there for the technology, the company's direction was not something I wanted to be part of long-term. As IEG's business model became clearer and the content side of the operation took centre stage, I made the decision to leave. I'd learned what I came to learn and built what I came to build. It was time to move on.

I don't have any interest in relitigating IEG's history or Seth Warshavsky's legacy. Seth passed away in October 2024, and he's not here to tell his side of things. What I will say is that the streaming technology we developed over 30 years ago in that small Seattle operation was real, it was early, and the experience of building it shaped my understanding of how new technology moves from the margins to the mainstream. That insight informed nearly everything I did afterward — from early e-commerce to domain infrastructure to digital currency.

Sometimes the most interesting technical work happens in the least expected places. I went to IEG because that's where the frontier was. I left because the frontier had moved on.