Some more infos: its not a big deal with mp4 with my tests, since mp4 caches, but its a big thing with HLS, because it does not cache and always re-request

I looked into this in the past as far as I can remember as you guessed the AVQueuePlayer with repeated AVPlayerItem's was a historic technique to achieve seamless looping.

It could now be replaced with a AVPlayerLooper (it has an option to disable looping) which was added in iOS 10 and also likely fixes a few reported expo-av issues such as repeated sounds #19198

Side note that I'm not sure if AVPlayerLooper would actually resolve any issue with HLS not being cached, maybe iOS will keep some HLS chunks in memory but I don't think it'll keep significant amounts cached.
There is documentation here about iOS techniques for downloading HLS content for offline playback but it seems to get a bit complicated dealing with different qualities.

I think a HLS cache would be out of scope right now. It's pretty complicated (but should eventually be integrated when dealing with loop someday). I know that react native video is working on this currently but not sure if it's really reliable.

Integrating AVPlayerLooper seems to be the right choice today, so we could try to fix this bandwidth issue while still being able to loop seamlessly .

I don't think AVPlayerLooper will actually resolve your issue, as far as I can gather it basically handles for you what the old method was doing, creates three AVPlayerItems and loops through them.

I do think what you really need is video caching, but I'm not sure if even react-native-video can handle that for HLS.

From my research, it might need https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avassetcache
But the real question is: how does it work under the hood, how does it handle multiple qualities and bitrates etc, and how long does it keep stuff cached? And will it be cached into memory or to disk, how long will it stay there etc.

More information:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/offline_playback_and_storage/using_avfoundation_to_play_and_persist_http_live_streams

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