system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Why do YouTube videos load faster while playing than they do when paused?
gpt
Google doesn't want to waste bandwith on someone who isn't watching a video. So they throttle the speed of data transfer of videos that have been paused for a long time, assuming that you have left the page and are never going to actually watch the video.