I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing.
You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.
By the time I got stuck with slow internet again (boycotting Comcast), they had removed that feature and it really sucked. Now I have fiber and the only drama is around Netflix only allowing you to stream a couple movies at once.
I'd rather let it buffer for 10 min, then watch it in 360p because you guys can't figure out your buffering. The same goes for netflix!
I used Internet in the 90s and dial-up specifically as recently as 2004 - and have quite a good memory of the experience. Internet at dial-up speed was an extremely valuable commodity, to the point of disabling images in the browser and only downloading the most essential things (which is about as far from a youtube video you can get) - like documents and zipped installers (after researching that it was what you actually needed) and checking email.
Internet "videos" didn't really even exist as content before ~2005 and Youtube. The biggest player before them was Break.com, which posted a whopping 10-15 videos a day.
While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s.
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To illustrate my point even further, the speed we're talking about isn't even dial-up speed. It's 6.5kbit/second, which makes it almost an order of magnitude slower than a 56k modem! 10 times slower!
And people are actually suggesting that someone would spend that valuable bandwidth to spend days to load a video...
I vividly remember waiting hours to download a video in the '90s. The Spirit of Christmas short that spawned South Park, and that news story about the exploding whale, were viral videos that predated modern video sites by many years. You'd download it off of an FTP server somewhere. At one point, the majority of my hard drive was devoted to half a dozen videos that I'd show to everyone who came over.
Basically, watching a video on your computer felt new and exciting and worth waiting for. I'd never do that today even if I were stuck on a slow pipe, but at the time it was oddly compelling.
That always reminds me: Earlier that decade, a major plot arc of Beverly Hills 90210 featured a nightclub called Peach Pit After Dark. The door of the club had a flying toaster, from the PC screensaver After Dark.
I remember using "download accelerators" to try and grab files faster back in the day. Who knew they were just doing 4 simultaneous downloads of ranges of the same file eh?
Ah I feel old
Incredibly useful for enormous files like visual basic 6, which I spent like...a month or so downloading in the late 90s.
And before there was YouTube there was flash videos/animations on Newgrounds. The people I hung with back then were into animutations.
Umm. Porn?
The bigger point was simply that people will wait for things they want. Not being able to load instantly changed the style of interaction but not the desire to listen to or watch things and there's far more content available than there used to be. Tell teenagers that the cool music video is available and you'll find a lot of slow downloads over their entire day at school, work, etc.
Internet video has been a thing a while before youtube got released hoping to capture enough of this thing through offering to host it for free in the hope to be bought later by one of the big players.
Someone doesn't agree with your comment, but rather than come back with a refutation they voted you down instead :)
And someone else don't agree with my comment .. modded down -4
If people chose to download porn over 28.8k modems, that's their choice. Just seems like a waste of time, that's all. Probably quicker just to take your dad's nudie mags rather than wait 6 hours for a 400x300 jpeg.
I remember frequently spending three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s. Mostly software, not videos+, but it really just felt like a regular thing back then.
+ Computers nearly didn't have the power to decode video—or even audio—in realtime back then, unless it was the entirely uncompressed kind. I recall ripping a CD to WAV and finding out half-way that my 2GB hard drive was now 100% full.
I remember the first realtime mp3 player on Windows, Fraunhofer IIS' WinPlay3, which launched in '95. Then Winamp came out in '97 and blew our minds.
My Pentium 166 on the other hand was much more capable I could multitask while playing Mp3's (I used to play mp3's and Quake at the same time).
AFAIK all sound drivers in Windows accepted standard PCM data.
Even tried it on mpg123 and mpg321 on RedHat on a 486 DX66 - I was poor. Didn't fare any better.
I, too, remember quite vividly waiting 30-40 minutes to download a 5MB installer for WinAmp and ICQ.
I honestly wouldn't even know where to look for videos in the 90s internet. Most people probably didn't have the upload speed to even consider sharing them online.
Ah Napster.
I'm very young, only 27, and know that I missed a full decade of early internet culture and can't speak to it. Even given that, I had a 14.4 and fondly remember downloading a music video for hours. (No porn on the modems personally, I think I was barely adolescent when we upgraded to cable)
The modern codecs make these super compressed video and sound relatively watchable.
We take file sizes for granted these days.
Right there in the same link, it says that the video page was a megabyte. It's the sentence directly after the 'two minutes' but. The sentence even has some 'all caps' words in it - even skimming, your eye is drawn to it. Why on earth did you stop reading halfway through the penultimate paragraph?