Eh. I was on dialup in the age you describe and none of that stuff ever worked for me anyway, even for low-bitrate radio the jitter was a killer. HTTP as transport coincided with wide democratization of access, and I don't think that is at all coincidental; by the time bandwidth penetration made broad access to packet-switched ~realtime (ie broadcast equivalent) streaming feasible, HTTP had achieved the required penetration to represent a local minimum.