system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: why did 'buffering' on online videos get worse instead of better?

I remember the good old days when you could let a video buffer in its entirety before watching it without annoying delays. This architecture seems to have gone the way of the dodo and I'm wondering why?
gpt
>I remember the good old days when you could let a video buffer in its entirety before watching it without annoying delays. 

Then content providers realized that they were wasting bandwidth (and thus money) on people who let something buffer, and then closed the tab without watching it, or stopped watching partway through.  So now they stop the buffering at a reasonable progress amount to avoid wasting bandwidth on parts of the video that you might not actually watch.