User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/The Success and Future of Modernization/@comment-24285282-20180128063911

It would be nice if videos could be moved to the bottom of the layout, between the article and media. This also allows the video to have time to buffer before the user scrolls down to it.

Also, disallowing autoplay can improve load performance on the page and videos. Playing of unnecessary videos is a waste of bandwidth, because you load more than the initial buffer. (Basically you should buffer, not play.)

One could theoretically allow for a placeholder thumb of a 15 second no-audio video that plays as soon as the user scrolls the video into view, and replays again when the user mouses over the video box. This should give an idea of what the video contains, without disrupting the user's workflow like a full video with audio would, and gives the user a chance to decide if they want to view the full video.

This should be done with both featured videos and advertisement videos, and hopefully could become a trend for advertisement video providers.

For increased efficiency, the start of the video should be pre-buffered at the end of page load by the javascript code of the HTML5 player regardless of if the video is clicked. This is in order to provide instant play without wasting bandwidth to provide the full download.

Another way to improve download times on mobile devices and other bandwidth limited devices is to create mirror images with reduced resolution for them. This will drastically reduce load time.