When you play a video over and over

I’m working on a video website and have the videos stored in a cloud service, that charges for data transfer.
Please tell me if I’m correct: when a video is selected on a web site to play, the video file is transferred out of the cloud to the website player, and that data transfer has a cost. But when the viewer wants to replay it and selects the play button again, it isn’t transfering from the cloud again is it? It transfered the first time, and is essentially downloaded to the player, so the extra plays are just looking at the downloaded file over and over right? Not transfering from the cloud over and over, correct?

I suspect that’s not the case. Look at YouTube, for example. You play a video, and you can see its download progress. Sure, you can replay it at that point without an extra download, but if you refresh the page and play again, it downloads again.

Videos are large assets, so I suspect browsers don’t cache them—which is basically what you are asking about here, I suspect. It would quickly clog up the browser.

EDIT: seems you can instruct the browser to cache video data, though it seems like a rather rotten thing to do to visitors, IMHO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5111382/under-what-conditions-will-the-browser-cache-video-files

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