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Found this dusty antique from the days when video players would let you buffer. If only this were still a thing.
(startrek.website)
Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?
For longer videos, a lot of people will stop watching before the video ends. A lot of bandwidth is wasted by buffering the entire video when the user is only going to watch 50% of it. To save bandwidth, sites like YouTube only buffer a tiny bit at a time.
I'm guilty of this. I'll queue up long music mix or ambient videos and just leave them going.
I meant something like opening a two hour long podcast and only listening to 30-60 minutes before closing the tab or switching to a different video. With the old functionality and current internet speeds, it likely would have buffered the entire video in only a few minutes. It could have wasted multiple GB of bandwidth.
IIRC YouTube breaks the videos up into chunks to achieve that