Hear me out...
Some posts on Imgur got me thinking. Could YouTube have existed before broadband internet? There was no real shortage of amateur video in the 80's or even earlier, all that was lacking was a means to distribute it.
Imagine every town and every neighborhood in a big city having their local YouTube store. You could browse for VHS tapes (and later CD's and DVDs) created by independent, often local, content creators. The most popular stuff would get shared to stores across the country. The best "channels" could conceivably go nation wide.
Commenting might be handled by US mail or by physical bulletin boards at local stores, maybe both. Dial up BBS's were also a thing at the time.
Content creators would get a percentage of the sale each time their video was rented. YouTube stores would provide additional services to the content creator such as duplicating an ideal number of copies of their content based on demand.
While a single 30 second cat video might not make the cut a compilation of cat videos could meet some sort of minimum video length set by the store.
Thoughts?