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It also helps that youtube serves shit tier quality videos more gracefully. Everyone is used to the step down to pixel-world on youtube to the point where they don’t complain much.

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And decent part of these users are on free tier, so they are not paying for it. That alone gives you some level of forgiveness. At least I am not paying anything for this experience.

I stream hours of 4k60 from youtube every day for free.

I get maybe 1m total of buffering per week, if that.

Seems uncharitable to complain about that.

Live streams have different buffering logic to video on demand. Customers watching sports will get very upset if there is a long buffer, but for a VOD playback you don't care how big the buffer is. Segment sizes are short for live and long for VOD because you need to adapt faster and keep buffers small for Live, but longer download segments are better for buffering.

Sorry, yeah, for some stupid reason I was not thinking about live streams.

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