I went on a road trip and as it was through the middle of nowhere, I downloaded a bunch of shows on various apps to watch on my phone in case I didn’t have data in certain places. When I would try to open a video on my phone that was downloaded (Bad Batch on D+) it would take literal minutes to start, but if I started streaming the same show/episode it would start almost immediately. This seems counterintuitive. Why does it happen?
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Streaming simply means that the media plays as it is being downloaded. A portion of the media is buffered so that bandwidth variations do not interrupt playback. Video quality can be adjusted to prevent the buffer from running out.
At full quality it takes the same amount of time (or even less) to download a media file as it takes to stream it. But streamed media seems faster because we start watching it right away instead of waiting for the whole file to finish downloading.
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