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Comment by ClassyJacket | Hacker News Reader

When I first heard an American on the internet talk about Netflix mailing DVDs, I thought it was a joke.

Kind of like if someone said TikTok existed in the 90s and they used to mail VHS tapes of people's home recordings.

Netflix has been around since 1997. At that time, directly streaming movies to consumers was techincally impossible anywhere in the world. As a non-American, how were you watching movies in 1997?

And yeah TikTok/etc didn't exist then. No one hard smartphones and the Internet was text/GIF only.

That said, we used to have the America's Funniest Home Videos show. People mailed in VHS recordings of their kids/pets doing cute, funny, or cringe things. This aired on TV and people voted to pick a winner. People could win $10k-100k in prize money. So yeah, proto YT or whatever was a thing, just scaled to available tech at the time.

EDIT: Just realized AFHV is still around, and will outlive Netflix DVDs. *That* certainly feels like a joke. How does a network television meme show still exist in 2023???

I did not think they were streaming movies in 1997 and I did not say I thought they were streaming movies in 1997. I thought they simply did not exist until years later when they started streaming. This should have been obvious from what I said, I'm not a total moron.

> directly streaming movies to consumers was techincally impossible anywhere in the world.

Yeah, a 33.6 kb/s modem vs a station wagon hurtling down the highway with a dvd is a fair fight.

Netflix was founded on August 29, 1997. In the Terminator franchise, that’s the day nuclear war destroys the world (“Judgement Day”).

I wonder if that was coincidence.

> As a non-American, how were you watching movies in 1997?

Video stores?

That actually sort of existed too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Funniest_Home_Vide...

If you think that's odd, look into Nintendo's history.

And for that matter, Amazon started just selling books.

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