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.

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.