options of pausing and looping are not good things when it comes to small animated clips ("gifs"). basically real video wins on download size and loses at ever

options of pausing and looping are not good things when it comes to small animated clips ("gifs"). basically real video wins on download size and loses at everything else for this use-case. but sites keep transcoding to mp4 because it keeps their bandwidth costs down. users don't care -- most internet is plenty fast enough to download even large gifs super fast.