One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video.
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.
This was the baseline experience everywhere in the 90s: people would just do something else while they waited for things to download over dialup. Clients for things like email, Usenet, browsers, etc. commonly had batch modes where you could queue large downloads so you could basically see what's new, select a bunch of large things, and then let it download while you got a cup of coffee / dinner / slept.
There was a time when Netflix was young, and I had slow internet, that if you queued up a movie and then paused it, it would continue to load. So you'd pick a movie, queue it up (literally) and then go make snacks and get situated. When the bar looked long enough you'd start watching. Then if it stalled (which it would do like clockwork every evening around 8 pm) you'd take an intermission.
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.
Alas, I bought a new TV just before 4K was a thing. It saved me the temptation of buying one while they were so expensive. The HD level is good enough for me.
Yes, back when things actually buffered properly on the internet. The way YouTube buffers now: not actually loading more than a few seconds of the video ahead of where I'm watching, even when it KNOWS my internet is spotty, really frustrates me.
You could install the YouTube Plus browser extension and check "disable DASH playback" in the settings. Then if you start playing a video for a second or two and pause it, it will buffer the entire thing. The only downside is I think it reduces the maximum video quality for all videos to 720p.
They try to match the resolution to your bandwidth. Sometimes that's the right solution, but not always. When the playback stalls right at the big reveal it can be painful, but that doesn't mean I want to watch the minecraft edition of the movie the whole time
And, as most things, I'd rather have the choice. If you want to default to auto-configured resolution, that's fine. But give me the choice to override if I want!
The sense I get is that it's an elaborate way to soften people up for abandoning their ISPs and going with Google Fiber. There's a whole system of alerts and pages for basically saying 'LOL ur internetz sux', and it's plausible to me that they'd get that in place in markets they've not currently entered yet.
Oh yes, I remember my teenager days of happily waking up in the morning knowing that our ISDN connection surely has finished the download of that album or live recording I started last night via Soulseek / DC++ / Audiogalaxy.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
It was a demo of Autodesk's Biped bone-animation software. It really took off when the producers of Ally McBeal licensed the baby to appear on their show.
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.
Hmm, either your experience, or memory, of the nineties / dial-up, is different than mine and all of my (quickly polled friends). We all built a library of painfully-obtained 320x200 horrible overcompressed video... ahh, the memories of RealPlayer. Some video was down to 180p... heck, I still have videos that were one or two megabytes in size in my archives - that I darn tootin' well waited hours to download :)
Please don't mention RealPlayer again. I feel ill and queasy thinking of that piece of software, its million rewrites and the CPU hog they released for Linux (at least on my lame hardware).
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?
A year or two ago, I went through some old files that had somehow followed me all through highschool. Among them were a handful of music and video files I got from friends passing around burned CDs. I was quite amused to play some random episode of Dragonball Z and have it pop up a postage-stamp sized video on my relatively high-res modern screen!
Two minor points: GPRS is 36-112Kbps and EDGE is faster still, so the 90s modem comparison seems apt to me. Latency is terrible so the player page loading slowly but the actual video playing is entirely plausible since that's the best case network traffic profile. Other technological improvements help, too: H.264 is much better than the codecs like MPEG-1 used for things like the infamous exploding whale video.
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.
IIRC in 1997 (was it 1996?) this thing called webcasting made lifecasting possible, Jennicam and Amandacam come to mind. Then there was stileproject and its treasure trove of videos, Not mentioning internet porn videos that people burned onto CDs to sell to people without internet.
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.
If I cared about karma or being modded down, I wouldn't post on the Internet, at all.
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 played MP3's on a 486 DX4/100mhz. There was a setting in winamp I had to turn on (I think it was quality related) otherwise it would stutter and be generally unlistenable. Even with that setting turned on it pegged the CPU at about 100% the computer was unusable for anything else while the mp3 was playing. Trying to seek in the track would sometimes crash winamp.
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).
I used a Pentium 100 MHz and it would play just fine. Encoding them would take real-time (i.e. a 3 minute song would encode in 3 minutes), but playing back was fine. I even listened to music while doing other things. This was with Winamp.
My intel box may have been a 166Mhz machine. Either way this assumed you weren't trying to do anything else. The PPC mac was definitely 100mhz though - maybe Apple marketing wasn't a lying about perf/clock back in those days.
Yes, my point was specifically about videos, and I've elaborated on it further in the post above.
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.
I think shockwave.com hosted Flash animated videos. Also, I remember downloading Troops from TheForce.net, seems like they had several other fan made videos. I also remember watching the Star Wars Episode I trailer on StarWars.com (I beleive it required the QuickTime plugin); so anyway, those are some sites hosting video content in the 90s.
That's because the pentium 2 chip isn't decoding the video. Try it with a software decoder some time. It hardly works. I had to disable video scaling before my 366 would stop dropping frames.
Perhaps you shouldn't be asserting yourself as an authority on what did or did not happen if you are too young to have experienced it in the first place.
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)
They don't watch videos (speaking from experience). But you do not and have never needed to watch TV to be well educated. The same is true of the internet. The tragedy that the post points out is that text and diagrams are being artificially weighed down with video-like anchors for no good reason.
I save the links to download later at some other place and view offline. Before I had ssh access to a server from a friend who copied what I downloaded (he also copies whole debian repositories for me).
In my observation (of people who still use dial-up here in the US), they usually just do something else (like make dinner or watch TV) while the video loads.
I used to rely on PC Plus and cover CDs for all of my software needs. I remember needing Qt for Linux (it was all new to me) and spending hours downloading a 16MB file, only to be grabbing the non-devel RPM.
When I had a slow connection I loved tools like youtube-dl because they didn't expect to be used interactively. Network tools like browsers that just assume they can monopolize your time are probably the most frustating things in these situations.
YouTube-dl helped a lot when I was living in a rural town a few years ago. I would download a bunch of tutorials over the weekend when I visited my parents in the city and watch them course of the week. Seems strange to say now, because this was the case only 3-4 years ago and only a few hundred km from where I currently live. Today I can't imagine watching in anything less than HD.
> 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.
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?
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.