Sometimes when I search on Google Groups I find some hits involving "video tape trading" and it seemed to be most in vogue between 1995 and about 2001/02. I find it as much as a hallmark of the early Internet as I do with Webrings, Chat Rooms, and Geocities-style pages. What caused such a decline and do you know anybody who still enjoys doing this despite this being the Youtube/Netflix streaming era?

Sometimes when I search on Google Groups I find some hits involving "video tape trading" and it seemed to be most in vogue between 1995 and about 2001/02. I find it as much as a hallmark of the early Internet as I do with Webrings, Chat Rooms, and Geocities-style pages. What caused such a decline and do you know anybody who still enjoys doing this despite this being the Youtube/Netflix streaming era?


It died with digitization, much like the audio taper scene.  The difference was that in the VHS era, computers simply didn't have the storage requirements, nor were they powerful enough to encode video. 

If it took an hour to download a 128kbps MP3 of a 6-minute song, that was one thing.  But if it took an hour to encode 30 seconds of video from VHS, and another hour to download it, and (in 1995) few computers could even display it, there was simply no point, except for pr0n.  Even when video capture cards existed, they were typically expensive and required immense (several gigabytes of free space for an hour of video, in an age when a 100-megabyte hard drive was considered large) diskspace.