Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?
HTML5 made video a first class citizen of your browser and buffering is handled automatically now 🙂
Oh! I just assumed they were trying to save $ on all those looong “___ 10 hr version” videos or something.
It’s both. Buffering the whole video was a waste of bandwidth and the changes for HTML5 means they could get away with lowering the buffering limit without destroying everyone’s viewing experience.
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.
YouTube still buffers video?
What he means is that, in olden days, videos would just keep buffering until the whole video was loaded. Now it’s only at most the next ~1min, no more. You were able to see the grey bar thingie go all the way to the end.
