I'm really surprised they use heuristics like this to decide the best video to show. If I were them, I would make a neural network to predict which video quali

I'm really surprised they use heuristics like this to decide the best video to show. If I were them, I would make a neural network to predict which video quality a user is least likely to switch away from. Then default to that. Inputs to the network should be country, detected network speed, CPU speed, browser, screen resolution, etc. also include the users history of changing resolutions - a user who frequently decreases the resolution is probably conscious of bandwidth and therefore doesn't want to default to HD even if their device is capable. The network can probably be tiny (perhaps just a few thousand weights), so could run on either the client or the server.