streamer

The oldest picture in the word: Middle English stremer, built from stream and -er, something that streams out on the air. Dryden's Annus Mirabilis (1667) gives it to a commander's waving flags, and Scott's Ivanhoe pairs it with banderole, the small pennant flown from a lance. By Robert W. Chambers's The Younger Set (1907) the shape alone is enough: long sprays of wisteria hang as streamers.

Entertainment journalism uses the word for the company, not the viewer: Netflix, Hulu and Amazon are streamers. Its natural foil is broadcaster. Jason Mittell in The Atlantic (2016) sets broadcasters like NBC against streamers like Netflix. Keep it apart from the person streaming games. Context usually settles it, because a streamer that commissions dramas or bids for sports rights is plainly a business.

Newspaper layout borrows the image of the long decorative flag: a line of type stretched across the top of the page like a pennant. Editors also call it a banner headline. It is conventionally kept for stories of major significance, so a streamer across the front page tells readers at a glance that this is the day's biggest news.

Light that takes the shape of the fluttering flag: the aurora's long, narrow rays rising from the horizon. The word pairs naturally with north. Macaulay's History of England writes of the northern streamers shining brilliantly under a full moon, and James Russell Lowell's Heartsease and Rue (1888) has the North's dumb streamers shooting overhead. Shoot is the verb that goes with it.

Anglers talk of throwing or stripping a streamer. It is fished actively below the surface and pulled back in short draws rather than left to drift. Long wings of feather or hair give it a minnow's outline and motion. In James W. White's Fly-fishing the Arctic Circle to Tasmania (2019), one angler nymphs while the other throws a streamer: two different methods on the same water.

A backup device named for the way it works: the tape runs continuously instead of stopping and starting, so data streams onto it. Streamers are sequential-access machines, valued for capacity and low cost per byte rather than for finding a single file quickly. That trade-off is why the word belongs to backup and archiving, and why everyday speech often prefers the plainer name tape drive.

In networking writing the word usually carries a qualifier saying what is streamed and how: an adaptive video streamer, a media streamer. The component delivers data as a continuous flow rather than as discrete file transfers. That is why engineers building one worry about bandwidth estimation and the overhead of extra burst packets, problems a simple file download never raises.

A British schoolroom word that usually comes with a label attached: A-streamers, B-streamers, the pupils of one particular stream. It presupposes streaming, which divides whole classes by ability, as opposed to setting, which groups pupils subject by subject. In Gale and Chapman's Psychology and Social Problems (1984), A-streamers gain in measured intelligence while B-streamers decline.

The stream here is the tin itself, meaning ore lying in the gravels of valley beds rather than in an underground lode. In historical tin mining, especially in Cornwall and Devon, streamers washed those gravels to recover cassiterite. The practice is older than lode mining and continued alongside it for a long time, so the word belongs to the history of the industry as much as to its technique.