I totally get where you’re coming from — I was in the same spot a while back when I first started looking into how streaming works beyond just using a video tag with a file URL.

What you’ve built so far is actually a basic form of progressive download, where the browser downloads the video file and starts playing it once there's enough buffered — but it's not true streaming in the sense platforms like YouTube use.

If you're dealing with on-demand videos and want better control and performance, setting up a basic video streaming server that supports HLS can be a great next step. You don’t need RED5 unless you’re going into live streaming — for VOD, a simple web server with HLS-compatible files works just fine.

You don’t need something like RED5 unless you’re going into live streaming. For local video-on-demand streaming, a simple setup using a web server (like NGINX or Apache) and pre-segmented HLS files can do the trick. Tools like FFmpeg can help you convert your videos into the right HLS format.

It’s a bit of a learning curve at first, but once you get the basics of HLS and how a player like Video.js or hls.js integrates with it, things start to click. Keep going — you’re actually on the right track!