By streaming I meant live streaming as opposed to video playback. There one can offer the video at different qualities by switching between different files, or change the quality adaptively within the same stream.
I'm not aware of sites using a minimum quality for adaptive streaming. It usually goes down all the way to potato quality, without a visible setting..?
I don't follow. Adaptive bitrate only applies to streaming.
> having to seek back because text suddenly became unintelligible
That's an issue with the minimum quality being set too low, not an issue with adaptive bitrate itself.