They didn’t exist. This person is full of it. There was no “golden age of internet video” before YouTube. Period.
Video was all through real player and was grainy, postage stamp affairs that constantly suffered from buffer underruns. It sucked. There was no independent dudes exploring abondoned buildings with high quality production (the proper people). No dudes picking locks in under 30 seconds (lock picking lawyer). No people taking apart power tools (ave).
None of that existed before YouTube. YouTube has dramatically changed the content landscape for the better—both for the producer and consumer. We’ve never lived in a greater time of independent content than now.
Sigh... I've replied to a couple of your other comments, but it is getting exhausting :( You are using quotes around something not from my comment, and not anything that I am referring to.
And it really seems like whatever site I tell you I miss is going to be met with reasons why YouTube is better for said content, which is completely orthogonal to my original point.
For some reason my comment got a lot of replies and comments. Take some time to think about why that is? Everyone is just on here full of it? Making up feelings of missing web sites? Maybe you don't miss any web sites–that is okay. Maybe it seems silly that someone would have strong-positive memories and emotions tied to certain web-sites that were actual communities to many of us–that is okay. But you shouldn't shame others. Not for this, not for anything.
Yeah, I also don't remember that. I remember being floored that Youtube was hosting so much video (you know, like 0.001% as much as they host now, by disk space consumed—way less of it and it was SD) for free—it blew my freaking mind. Server disk and bandwidth like that was so expensive. It was easy to find free hosting but it came with low disk use limits—video wasn't happening. Paid wasn't yet anywhere near as cheap as it is now, and came with lower limits. You could just sign up for free and upload... anything? Minutes and minutes, adding up to hours, of it? And anyone could watch it? It was incredible.
Of course I didn't yet understand the idea of operating at a huge loss to generate hockeystick growth and attract VC and/or acquisition, so I wasn't wrong and the math didn't make any damn sense, I just didn't know that it didn't matter.
It also seemed wild that their player actually kinda mostly worked. In the browser! Before YouTube it was all awful RealPlayer videos at ultra-low res and smeary, high compression rates, or maybe a short .mov or something of similar quality, and if it was streaming rather than a download it woul... [BUFFERING] ...d freeze constantly. Napster and friends were still mostly for music at the time. Some video sharing was going on but it was, like, really low-quality DiVX rips of DVDs for burning to CDs.
Most were small sites that had a few videos about a specific topic, and whose videos were not optimized for search engines or anything other than the topic at hand.
Why do you hear the words "hey guys" or "you guys" in virtually every YouTube video today? Because it's an approved (and extremely boring, meaningless, and effortless) way to address your audience in a non-specific manner.
Internet videos had a lot more character before they were a source of income.
Of course that same income potential produces a lot of garbage 20 minute videos about the latest Nintendo Switch rumor, for example, and they also allow truly passionate people to make money creating the videos they would not have time to create without that income, so it's a mixed bag.
The internet in general 20 years ago had a lot more character overall before people figured out how to make it profitable.
I'd wager the lack of availability and communication of widely accessible videos were limited mostly by cost of bandwidth. Watching videos over 28k was no joy.
In the early 2000s before YouTube, IME it was a lot more about P2P than web-based publishing or streaming (as mentioned, streaming video was mostly horrible RealPlayer).
A lot of videos were shared and downloaded through DirectConnect and the FastTrack (Kazaa/Grokster/iMesh/Morpheus) and Gnutella (Limewire) family protocols. Some was discovered via search and some (especially at LAN parties) via browsing others' archives. People seem to forget that early day P2P was far from only piracy - this is how homemade content was spread as well.
More sophisticated people would have web sites linking to FTP archives of their own content. I also gather that file-sharing (mostly piracy?) via IRC was big, but it's not something I personally used.
The web was less conflated with the internet back then.
Video quality and bitrates are tightly related. 240p video (320x240) requires 300-700 kbps for live streaming, well beyond the capabilities of modems. 360p is in the 700kbps - 1.5 Mbps range, now considered low-end DSL. 720p, a reasonable HD resolution (1280×720) runs at 2-4Mbps, and 4K is 15-25Mbps.
My own recollections are that live streaming video wasn't a commonly-encountered thing until the mid-2000s, that Netflix was still mailing (rather than streaming) video as of 2007, and adoption of that service took considerable time.
As of the late 1990s, online audio was a relative rarity, and much of that RealAudio based, witness early archives of programming from NPR and other sources locked in inaccessible, and very low-quality, audio codecs.
Assertions of a pre-2004, let alone pre-1999, golden age of Internet Video are implausible.
You (and others in this thread) might be taking GP's 'before YouTube' a bit literally - it existed for a long time before it was in the dominant hyper-popular position (or even Google/Alphabet owned as) it is today.
For video, it was really a bit later into the early and mid 00s.
Answering this is hard, though. The best way to think about it is think of all those super random, niche subreddits. I'm sure all of those had cool, interesting web sites made by people really into that thing. So really they existed for everything. Find someone who was online a bunch during this time people and ask them if them were members of any interesting online forums.
True Honest Question.
What were these sights? I was a teenage in the 1990s. I seriously and literally do not know and now I want to.