Intelligently streaming portions of media at higher quality over a limited bandwidth connection

One or more segments of media content are designated for rendering at a higher quality when possible over a connection having a bandwidth that is too limited to support streaming of the entire media at that quality. Some of the media is streamed at a lower quality, leaving some bandwidth available for pre-streaming higher quality segments that can be wholly or partly cached before they are due to be rendered. When the higher quality content is to be rendered, the cached segment data can be used to render the segment at the higher quality to the user.