Something's gone wrong with communication here:
It is the exact equivalent.
Except it never discards the buffer (they do this all the time), I can seek with impunity (I do this all the time), it doesn't consume huge amounts of CPU (they do this all the time), it goes full screen reliably and quickly (on linux they fail frequently), If there are problems with the connection then I won't lose everything I've downloaded (online video players are so terrible about this), I can run it at any speed I want (I do this all the time), I can supplement it with third party subtitles (I do this all the time) ect. ect. ect.
further, no bizarre bandwidth saving gets involved. If the connection is very bad, I can just let it download. It won't stop after 10 seconds and wait for me to play, and I get to decide when it starts playing. I can resume failed downloads, I can respond to bad connections, I can use web technologies that have existed for decades that are specifically there to deal with bad connections to route around poor network conditions.
Video players on the web are just death by a thousand cuts. They're all different unique little snowflakes, and all worse then windows media player from 2001. We are literally swimming in methodologies to deal with poor network connections, and the inter
but other than that they are equivalent.