[nine_k]

While I see what you mean, a BBS was an inherently local thing, unless you fancied paying long-distance fees even if a distant BBS would accept LD calls at all. That might be acceptable for important texts and other very compact formats (small pictures, MIDI tracks), but for pirating music, let alone video, it was out of question.

[zorked]

The problem there is just technological: the problem with movies and video was the unavailability of good enough codecs/large enough media+bandwidth. Otherwise BBS would have been a hell of a party for those too.

For software my local BBSs, very very far from any rich country, somehow managed to get every major software release a few days before launch day. Yes, before. It was all one huge global network already, just a bit asynchronous.