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’ll open dozens of 15-45min videos, watch a few to completion, close the rest after watching a tiny bit or nothing at all.
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.
