Greentext

I watched Key The Metal Idol in 56 kbps. Downloaded, of course, because trying to stream using RealPlayer never fucking worked. I'm pretty sure I could fire up a server and client over my home network, to-day, and it'd still pause with "Buffering..." twice per minute.

Anyway, I'm discussing video on Game Boy in another thread, and dial-up quality video was still ridiculous.

Those RealPlayer Southpark episodes were 15mb and had 8 pixels

I watched the entirety of Blair witch project the week before it came out in a real player at 300 by 200 pixels. I kept rotating between watching it thumbnail sized and watching it regular player sized. Both were equally inferiorating

Yeah this was going on before that. Media Piracy really set-off in the late 90s when DSL, and cable, internet services became mainstream. Also Netflix started making their own content in response to a growing number of competing services, all fighting over the same pool of production companies' work, and having exclusive rights to one IP, or another, rather than other services being the result of netflix making their own content.

Yes, but you are old as a rock.
Those times are lost in the unknowable pre-history of what we call "the internet" today.