I worked in this space on the CDN non-pirate side and it's basically the same thing but everyone (including the major ones you know) distribute all of their con

I worked in this space on the CDN non-pirate side and it's basically the same thing but everyone (including the major ones you know) distribute all of their content like that over various cdns and they're all competitively tested against one another for errors/latency/etc and traffic auto-shifted based on live current cost + that magic. If you're interested in some of the tools used that essentially re-unites from endless sources, auto determines bitrate, allows you to interject interstitial ads based on geography/user tokens etc, check out things like bitmovin. No relation, I've just used it. Then cedexis for the latency/error-rate magic that makes your cdns compete against one another. There's also jwplayer which a lot of video platforms like Univision and Fox use. https://bitmovin.com/ https://bitmovin.com/ https://github.com/bitmovin https://github.com/bitmovin Another interesting thing is how the DRM is handled, the video chunks that are all muxed/reunited/demuxed, etc on the fly- https://developer.bitmovin.com/encoding/docs/how-to-protect-your-content-with-bitmovin-and-vualto-drm#creating-manifest-for-dash https://developer.bitmovin.com/encoding/docs/how-to-protect-... I started out in video stuff back in RTSP days (2005ish), took a LONG break in that area (2016ish) and the systems today are so cool. IIRC back then everything was rtsp. I actually have no idea beyond what you just mentioned how the pirate side does things so that's neat. I wonder what tools they're using. https://jwplayer.com/ https://jwplayer.com/ https://www.cedexis.com/ https://www.cedexis.com/ .. which I guess was bought by citrix so I have no idea whats up with that now.