Many modern-day streaming protocols are built on top of HTTP purely because firewalls don't block it and proxies can forward it. Obviously that's a terrible id

Many modern-day streaming protocols are built on top of HTTP purely because firewalls don't block it and proxies can forward it. Obviously that's a terrible idea from a performance point of view, but it's a fact of life that things are broken and we can deal with it by moving up the protocol stack.