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As someone who comes from a village in northern England, I can tell you that it only just got upgraded to VDSL from the 3 mbps ADSL 2 it had been at for 5-8 years.
Thankfully it is only 1.5-2 miles from the closest exchange, but many rural communities are much further out than that and still lack the FTTC/VDSL upgrades that have existed near the exchanges for over half a decade (therefore stuck with ultra low ADSL data rates). Expensive 4G mobile broadband data is sadly a bad option if you plan to consume any significant amount of video per month.
All this adds up to the fact that low/ultra low bitrate video is far from corner case, even in first world countries - mainly because rural areas being lower population density are treated like third world countries by BT/Open Reach.
It wouldnt surprise me to find out that many rural places in Europe and the US suffer from similarly slow uptake of landline fibre based broadband technologies.
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