If a streaming video isn’t fully loading, why does it seem to load if you go back a few seconds and replay?

Question

I don’t know if there’s actually a technical thing occurring or maybe just a psychological effect where you feel like rewinding made an impact.

In: 1

Answer 1

You’re giving it more time to buffer. The stream will try to always have a few seconds of video/audio ahead of what you’re seeing loaded so that occasional blips in transfer don’t cause the entire stream to stutter. If too many blips in transfer happen, you might run through that buffer, which will interrupt your stream. When you “rewind” the stream a bit, you’re giving it a few more seconds to rebuild that buffer.