[blip54321]

Yes, the web would have survived.

Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for.

Even so, entertainment should be... entertaining. I got free Paramount Plus with my phone service. It has DRM, adblocker-detectors, and all sorts of other nonsense to where it usually doesn't play videos. I went with Youtube over Star Trek. That's not an ideological choice; it's just not entertaining to fight with computers to play a video or to talk to support.

I suspect the effect would have been the opposite: a more rapid decline of the major content producers. This stuff needs to be easy and to work. Netflix did that, before everyone started to jump ship. Napster did it well too.

At some point, there's a spiral, where:

- Declining usability / quality leads to declining viewership

- Declining viewership leads to declining budget

- Declining budget lead to declining usability / quality and more pressure on monetization

... and so on. That's the disruption S-curve. In retrospect, I'm guessing that would have happened if large content producers forced apps.

[lelandfe]

> Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for.

By bandwidth, streaming is what the majority of the web is used for. PDF warning: https://www.sandvine.com/hubfs/downloads/phenomena/2018-phen...

> Video is almost 58% of the total downstream volume of traffic on the internet

[parrellel]

But video is probably the most data-intensive thing most people interact with. How many webpages, books, songs, pdfs is equivalent to a 4 minute 1080p Youtube video?