(no title)
arihant | 4 years ago
1. They took full advantage of DMCA and pirated videos made easy home there until copyright notice came in. No technology to try and do it before upload, no pre publish human intervention.
2. YouTube player was just better, especially with most of the globe on dial up. It would let videos buffer for hours until 100%, even if you had a disconnection it would just restart downloading as it should. Won’t just stop after some time to preserve bandwidth. Once downloaded, videos won’t restream and you could easily move on timeline so long as you kept the browser window open. None of their competitors did this as I recall and were preserving bandwidth they would never get to use.
deanCommie|4 years ago
All online video players did this (continue buffer until 100%) at the time. It's the simpler and more naive option.
In fact, YouTube was the first to introduce the feature that it didn't pre-buffer the whole thing to save bandwidth many years later, and it was HUGELY controversial in the geek community.