[ltbarcly3]

Nope, they aren't spending a billion dollars on some wild longshot strategy to try to make streaming a thing when 90% of thr country was on dialup, and the best video codec an average computer could decode was mpeg2 at 480p. Nope.

[rob74]

According to Wikipedia:

> The high-definition optical disc format war was a market competition between the Blu-ray and HD DVD optical disc standards for storing high-definition video and audio; it took place between 2006 and 2008 and was won by Blu-ray Disc.

by then, DSL was already well established, and according to this graph https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-... the average internet connection in the US was 3.67 Mbps - much slower than today, but much faster than would be possible if 90% still had 56 kbps. Doesn't make GP's conspiracy theory any more likely, but just for context...

[ltbarcly3]

You are right, it seems that about 80% of internet users had broadband in 2008. However, about 40% of people in the US were still not users of the internet and 10% were still on dialup. I don't know if the average speed means much in terms of addressable market for streaming (if 1% of the people in the US have gigabit connections, the average is 10mb even if 99% of people are on dialup), but I couldn't find any statistics on the median internet speed.

[anthk]

Back in the day people used DivX ;) and XVid.