[ASalazarMX]

Counterpoint: Plex and Jellyfin free resources if you leave your video paused too long, and it will take a noticeably amount of time to resume streaming, much more if it needs transcoding.

They're not going out of their way to annoy us, they try to be efficient with the finite resources a home server has. Netflix is going out of their way to make it smooth no matter what you do, even if they have to pool a bit of their own resources for it.

[ndriscoll]

Buffering would be on the client though. Assuming it has a couple dozen MB of memory, it should be able to buffer like 30 seconds. I realize their resume has more to do, but e.g. my jellyfin server can initiate playback or seek within maybe 100-250 ms (it's just barely a noticable pause after a random seek). So a 30 s buffer should be more than sufficient for unpausing without any stutter.