You're linking to a page with a 5 second 1MB video on it. Yes, it's easy to use the <video> element to serve a video file no larger than a picture. No, that does not mean you have a system that will allow thousands of users to watch an 11 min HD video during their subway ride that starts instantly and never pauses, stutters, or locks up.
I can't speak to Dutch websites but in the U.S., a news website will usually feel obligated to provide subtitles on their videos to avoid lawsuits under the ADA.
Oh that's interesting! The US is portrayed here as this free for all country (limited unemployment money, health services, PTO...) but then subtitles are mandatory? That's cool! I presume we don't have such a law since the news sites I frequent don't seem to offer that for most videos (not counting youtube's autogenerated attempt for the few sites that outsource video hosting to google)
As for that video being small and not receiving thousands of simultaneous views: sure, but buying sufficient bandwidth is not a "hire better programmers" problem. You don't need to beat Reddit's skills and resources to provide smoother video playback. Probably the opposite actually: smaller scale should be easier to handle than reddit scale, and they already had that all set up