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Comment by slimscsi | Hacker News Reader

Cost and scale. HTTP video is significantly cheaper to deliver because of the robust and competitive CDN market.

You can deliver all your video via WebRTC with lower latency, but your bandwidth bill will be an order of magnitude higher.

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But if you are using a CDN you are not really streaming, are you?

Love this. A great point. HLS via CDN is really just "downloading files but the source is provided kinda fast"

"Streaming" in the media industry just means you don't need to download the entire file before playing it back. The majority of streaming services use something like HLS or DASH that breaks up the video into a bunch of little 2 to 10 seconds files. The player will then download them as needed.

But even then, many CDNs CAN "stream" using chunked transfer encoding.

Having to download the whole file before playing it back is kind of the exception, isn't it ?

As the article says, HLS or DASH are specifically about not having to suffer through buffering by auto-dialing quality down, otherwise you can also start viewing during download with the browser <video> tag, over FTP with VLC, or even with peer to peer software like eMule or torrents !

I'm not sure what "real" streaming would even be ? (It probably wouldn't be over HTTP...)

It's just packet switching with much larger packets, the streaming you're thinking of is essentially the same, just with 16-50 ms sample size rather than 2-10 seconds.

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