No, DailyMotion (and probably others) existed before Youtube and worked just as well. They simply lost at the "winner takes all" market share war.

How much did Daily Motion pay their creators?

It’s a shame that RealPlayer is remembered like that, given that they were doing their best with 56k modem connections. My current internet connection is something like 15,000 times faster than in 2000, so I expect that I would probably not be waiting for buffering.