Sorry for delayed reply, it was already late last night when I posted my 1st response, I did wait some time but didn't see any update 
The "Places" icon is active when Live is scanning for packs or for the audio library. This can take a while if you have placed custom folders onto Live's Browser on the left. Now unless you started to download "Packs" from Ableton, Live shouldn't be downloading something on it's own except for a new version update if you activated the option in the preferences, but that's done in the background anyway.
You can click on the "Packs" icon and scroll down to the bottom of the list to check if Live is downloading any packs from Ableton's website and could be using Internet bandwidth. If Live is only scanning for the library & custom audio folders the "Places" icon should stop to spin after some time.
Does using another web browser helps BTW ?
Also on the video player, you could try different playback settings as well as the pop-up window watching mode on the left side, but yes, make sure that no Ableton's packs are downloading at the same time.