Articulate Online a Bit Slow?

I've seen a number of questions related to this topic posted, and they either don't have responses or were related to a specific maintenance update for Articulate Online. My issue, as far as I can tell, is unrelated to any maintenance update.

We've been using Articulate Online to host our videos for almost two years now, and I've noticed that over that time the load times for videos has gotten longer and longer. We have Storylines of varying lengths containing various amounts of interactivity. Some are simply recorded webinars housed in Storyline with a few zooms and highlights added, and others are more interactive and include more onscreen items. If a user wishes to skip ahead on a slide that's much more than a few minutes, the slides often freeze altogether or just take way too long to buffer (or whatever's going on behind the scenes). While AO seems to be slowest during our regular business hours (9-5PST, Mon-Fri), customers and other employees at our company have complained consistently over the last five or six months about the performance of our videos.

It is CRUCIAL to our business model to provide information to our customers using videos and other help content. Our company has an insanely good internet speed, and playback still often lags. I can only imagine what our customers viewing our videos with a slower connection must be experiencing.

Is it more reliable to run Storyline files through an LMS or for us to host the files ourselves, rather than using AO? Is it the case that the more files you have uploaded to AO the slower it performs? What is the most reliable way to host Storyline content that provides the fastest load times for viewers?

On a side note, our help site (on which we use Storyline) is HTTPS, so we've been forced to have the videos open up in a separate window because AO doesn't stream through HTTPS. Could this be related to how slow it is?