You could stream 144p6 video with phone-like audio with a RealPlayer browser plugin and a 28k modem in 1998. Very few websites served video but some TV channels were available live like this, maybe also in 240p15 at double the bitrate with a luxury 56k modem or ISDN. Viewers with slower modems could often download such videos as VODs (depending on copyright because those didn’t have RealPlayer DRM) as WMV (with Microsoft’s proprietary codec better than MPEG-2) or AVI (as MPEG-2 so you could burn it onto a CD and view on a DVD player but it’s unlikely you’d have a big disk and CD burner but processor too slow for that video). DVD-quality video (high bitrate 480p30/480i60/480p24/576p25/576i60, now considered low-end for movies) only became available to stream about 10 years later.
You could stream 144p6 video with phone-like audio with a RealPlayer browser plugin and a 28k modem in 1998. Very few websites served video but some TV channels were available live like this, maybe also in 240p15 at double the bitrate with a luxury 56k modem or ISDN. Viewers with slower modems could often download such videos as VODs (depending on copyright because those didn’t have RealPlayer DRM) as WMV (with Microsoft’s proprietary codec better than MPEG-2) or AVI (as MPEG-2 so you could burn it onto a CD and view on a DVD player but it’s unlikely you’d have a big disk and CD burner but processor too slow for that video). DVD-quality video (high bitrate 480p30/480i60/480p24/576p25/576i60, now considered low-end for movies) only became available to stream about 10 years later.