I was thinking more of the case where the video was playing fine then it starts buffering and pauses then will sit there indefinitely after buffering unless I i

I was thinking more of the case where the video was playing fine then it starts buffering and pauses then will sit there indefinitely after buffering unless I intervene by clicking pause unpause etc. Basically caused by an imperfect connection. I think like myself many people have thought, “oh if I just wait it’ll start playing again”.. but I suspect many of the people who make the video sites don’t want each of the client pages to go into a polling loop that spams their servers so they sort of have a back off scheme where if your internet link is not perfect it progressively gets worse and worse and then just sort of sits in slow retry loop. So the user hitting a button basically interrupts the slow retry loop and effectively commands the player instance to try streaming again.