We all remember videos used to fully load if you just left them be. Youtube sure, but also every other web player used to load the whole video if you left it loading. And now, it only ever loads 10 seconds so if you have bad connection you can never watch uninterrupted.
I understand maybe that one company stopped doing that because they messed up, but all of them? I really can’t understand how ALL webplayer companies on the planet decided to make their product worse and there is NO competitor who goes back to the old ways and with that would probably win a ton of market share again.
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Why does nobody just build an old web player that everybody loves? Why do we have to live with a worse product and no alternatives?
In: Technology
It saves a **lot** of money because loading video you’re not going to watch doesn’t happen anymore, and the number of people bothered by this is, is low enough to not be a problem.
Imagine you have a banana stand.
Everyone who comes to the banana stand can get up to 5 full bananas.
You start out by giving anyone who comes 5 Bananas whether they want all 5 bananas or not.
However one day you notice a bunch of people were throwing out the bananas. It turns out they didn’t actually want all 5 bananas. They just wanted 1 or 2.
You thought this was wasteful. In order to not waste bananas and save money you start to give out bananas 1 at a time. Anyone can still get 5 bananas, but only if they ask for them 1 by 1.
You can think of a banana as a 10 second packet of video, and some people just want to watch a little bit of a video, not the whole thing.
So in order to save money youtube (and other video players) only gives you what you ask for when you need it, instead of giving it to you all at once.
Connections got better and better over the years and loading to the end a video you’re not going to finish is a waste of resources (ultimately money) for the platform. Those resources could be used to serve more customers.
It’s about saving bandwidth and ensuring a stable experience for the vast majority of users. Sorry but if your connection is so slow that you can’t watch online videos in standard definition then your experience is not relevant, nobody is going to make it better for you because you don’t matter. You should write letters to your local politicians to demand better internet infrastructure in your area or perhaps start some community initiative to raise money to create your own. It’s 2024, starving babies in Africa can watch youtube on their iphones and they’ve been doing that for years.
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