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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I remember that Nickelodeon had a contest where the winner was given a videophone and was part of some gameshow. I suspect it ran on ISDN.

Edit: There was also video CD, but that was higher bandwidth than ISDN. I also used to download South Park episodes over my dialup modem. They weren't quite real time (IE, it took longer than the playback time to download,) but they were a low multiple. (IE, a 20 minute episode took ~30-40 minutes to download).

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Actual video CD is over a megabit per second. If you were downloading at half real time over a modem it wouldn't have been nearly as many bits, though maybe it was still MPEG 1? A lot of south park downloads were RealVideo, two generations more advanced than VCD (and two less advanced than HEVC).

They were RealVideo, very low bitrate

See too ISDN[0] album by The Future Sound of London.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN_(album)

> I remember that Nickelodeon had a contest where the winner was given a videophone and was part of some gameshow. I suspect it ran on ISDN.

I won a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog in that contest! AFAIK, it was just a retail copy and a letter; the game might still be at my parents' house, but I certainly don't have the letter. I was not selected to be on the show or anything. I remember watching the scrolling rules when they were doing the promotion and writing down a couple bits of the address every time.

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