I worked for a company called Streamroot which sold exactly this, and I can tell your first paragraph is indeed correct but the second isn't: we had major streaming platforms as customers when I was there (not global giants like Netflix or YouTube, but big european players like Canal+ or Eurosport) and we also had plenty of warez websites (streaming sport, animes, porn, etc.).

I then left and the company later got acquired by Level 3 so I don't know exactly how it evolved but it's likely that they abandoned the illegal streaming market for reputational reasons and stuck with big players.

> I then left and the company later got acquired by Level 3 so I don't know exactly how it evolved

It just struck me that there are probably plenty of large media companies that use all sorts of proprietary video streaming products for distribution that we've never heard of, simply because the tech isn't available to consumers.

Media companies are generally pretty secretive about their tech (Netflix being the exception to this rule), so there isn't much to be found about this. The piracy community (because, let's be real here) also won't be interested in a non-free (speech and beer) streaming solutions like these. So that's probably why there is just very little public information available.

But if you use paid digital TV products (Eurosport being a perfect example here) then you are probably already using all sorts of P2P streaming protocols you've never heard of.