| ▲ | thephyber 4 hours ago | |
CloudFlare and the hyperscalers are the reason bandwidth costs have dropped so dramatically. I remember hearing from a CloudFlare founder not long after they raised an early round how they had to go around negotiating large peering contracts to make enough bandwidth available for their customers. And that Australia was by far the most expensive region because they had very few undersea cables and only a single company providing that access. End users present like you can always drive up to the gas station and there will always be plenty to fill up your 10-20 gallon tank. But behind the scenes are massive distribution networks and a market making mechanism. Also I don't buy your premise that illegal video streaming only make money on ads. I'm under the impression they also sell access to a lot of viewer's machines to companies that want to crawl the web and appear to come from lots of residential ISP nodes. | ||
| ▲ | privacyishuman 4 hours ago | parent [-] | |
> Also I don't buy your premise that illegal video streaming only make money on ads. I'm under the impression they also sell access to a lot of viewer's machines to companies that want to crawl the web and appear to come from lots of residential ISP nodes. How would they do this from your web browser? If we're talking about TV apps, many piracy ones are FOSS while legal companies turn your TV into a residential proxy. It's a highly competitive space: https://fmhy.net/video#stream-aggregators | ||