If that was the only problem, why wouldn't changing the stream with a small amount of JS have worked rather than having to add a muxing layer in front of the streams?
2. Given this is Cloudflare they are probably trying to find optimal ways to use bandwidth and their edge fleet. Like TV, maybe there will be no "rewind", and each Cloudflare edge server fans out the same "currently live" bytes to all available clients (i.e. shared state across all client connections, rather than independent state for each client connection). Which can't happen if there is a "refresh" event from each client that needs to be synchronized.
3. "refreshing" implies new state, added latency, and a "janky" feel. If "transitioning" is all server side, bytes from the next "episode" can be pipelined before the previous episode is finished and the refresh event has occurred.
|-Episode A->|
|-Episode A->|
|-Episode A->|
| <-|
| <--Refr|
|<--Refresh--|
|-> |
|de B-> |
|-Episode B->|
|-Episode B->|
|-Episode B->|
|-Episode A->|
|-Episode A/B->|
|-Episode A/B->|
|-Episode B->|
|-Episode B->|
|-Episode B/C->|> Bring Cloudflare TV to platforms like Apple TV and Roku