I think you're talking about a different use case then OP. For your point, an example is viewing 1080p on 64kbit/s is unreasonable and nothing will fix it. Fo

I think you're talking about a different use case then OP. For your point, an example is viewing 1080p on 64kbit/s is unreasonable and nothing will fix it. For OP's point, I can imagine viewing 1080p (10Mbit/s) on a 1Gbit/s connection means a little buffer will solve the need for ABR as random packet loss or minor drops can be recovered with retries seamlessly as opposed to dropping quality to ABR. So buffering is futile only when bandwidth is not sufficient, and even there its questionable, perhaps user might just want to download and view after that's complete rather then have poor quality.