I am also affected by this, backward playback causes the player to constantly buffer and clear buffer. I minified the impact by setting bufferingGoal: 1 and a rebufferingGoal: 0 but it is still wasting a lot of bandwidth.

@joeyparrish you mentioned that you had thoughts on this might be addressed. Could you share? Depending on priority and complexity, the team can take it on or we could open this for external contributions.

My gut feeling is that since today, StreamingEngine follows a SegmentIterator to decide what to fetch, what we need is something like a ReverseSegmentIterator. Any time the play rate changes, StreamingEngine could check if it changed between negative and non-negative and re-init the iterator accordingly. This would keep most of the complexity of the change in the implementation of ReverseSegmentIterator, which would be relatively easy to test in isolation.