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The Revolution Wasn't Televised: the Early Days of YouTube
mrflash818 sends this report from Mashable:
A decade ago, Netflix meant DVDs by mail, video referred to TV and the Internet meant simple text and pictures. All that changed in about 20 months. ... It was hard to get a handle on what YouTube was, exactly. The founders didn't know how to describe the project, so they called it a dating site. But since there weren't many videos on the site, Karim populated it with videos of 747s taking off and landing. Desperate to get people on the site, YouTube ran ads on Craigslist in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, offering women $20 for every video they uploaded. Not a single woman replied. Another vision for YouTube was a sort of video messaging service. “We thought it was going to be more of a closer circle relationship,” Chen said in a 2007 interview. “It was going to be me uploading a video and sharing it with eight people and I knew exactly who was going to be watching these videos — sharing with my family and my friends.” What actually happened was a “completely different use case” in which people uploaded videos and shared them with the world.
Before the advent of YouTube there had been others who had wanted to launch similar service, and the one big hurdle is the huge bandwidth cost that the videos consumed
Had it not because of Google, which bought up YouTube, it wouldn't have survived
But video sucked in 1997 and it kept sucking until YouTube; if a random person wanted to share a video to a handful of people there really wasn't a good way of doing it. Realplayer was a client, not a distribution system, I remember downloading VideoCDs with FlashFXP off of questionable sites and getting binaries from usenet but it was shit compared to YouTube.
You can find out the urls by either installing a download extension for your browser, or using an extension that shows the HTTP headers for all the requests your browser does, or in many other ways that get progressively more tedious.
Interestingly enough, real streaming content existed and was unsuccessful before youtube. It existed in the form of an rtsp protocol implemented by a small company called RealMedia. It was unsuccessful because the player was constantly buffering and the picture quality was too low to improve throughput. This was years _before_ youtube.
Video quality on the net improved only when streaming was abandoned in favour of file downloads, because this insulates you from network issues better than on the fly buffering, and it also allows higher resolution and quality tradeoffs in a more continuous way.
Of course the biggest improvement was simply that in the last 15 years most people have had acess to broadband, to the extent that people like you are duped into thinking your downloaded content is "streaming".