But if you couldn't even load the pages to browse through the videos, that'd pretty significantly reduce your watching even further.
Liken it perhaps to a library where you could only get 1 book per week. Well that's not much, but at least you can get 1 book. But if you go to the library you have to wait in line for an hour, and after examining one book section of 10 books, you have to wait 5 minutes to examine the next one. Choosing the weekly book would become such a chore you'd probably not even bother to go anymore. But if you'd suddenly be able to examine the entire library with only 1 minute of total waiting, many more would be much more inclined to do so, even if they could still only borrow 1 book per week.
Beyond that in my experience, lots of requests in a slow connection often fails before completing fully. I don't know why exactly, I've never been a network engineer. While streaming in a slow connection eventually gets there. So it's entirely possible that even browsing normal pages was failing entirely before for some people, even though (if they ever did load the page and choose a video), the video download worked fine albeit at a very slow pace.
My favorite example of this is YouTube repair tutorials. If I need to get something done, these can be irreplaceable. If I had a slow connection, but my car was up on the jack stand, I'd just have to wait.
This was my first experience with the web in high school, with a modem, on AOL. I loved it.
My friends sent me e-mail with a youtube link and I literally waited one hour or so to view that. Just let it loading while reading something else.
So, the trouble here is not me having low bandwidth, but having connections on broadband places.
And even people with no connections in the first world want to see video clips online.