Napster was so early that most folks didn’t have the bandwidth and CPU speed to deal with decent-quality video yet, so it initially only did MP3s. I think some folks forget about it because they didn’t get into the piracy scene until they could get TV shows/movies/software etc.
No, the real problem was that Napster had central servers that could easily be taken down via litigation. Limewire was fully P2P so there was no single point of failure.
Napster was so early that most folks didn’t have the bandwidth and CPU speed to deal with decent-quality video yet, so it initially only did MP3s. I think some folks forget about it because they didn’t get into the piracy scene until they could get TV shows/movies/software etc.
I vividly remember spending twenty minutes downloading a single song over my 56k modem 🥲
No, the real problem was that Napster had central servers that could easily be taken down via litigation. Limewire was fully P2P so there was no single point of failure.
That’s why Napster went away (possibly before people late to the party had a chance to use it), but it didn’t stop it from being “the OG.”
I still have a few folders of music from Napster.