[grkvlt]

Cost of servers to handle millions of TLS connection initialisations and HTTPS stream decryptions, versus simple plain-text streaming...

[movedx]

TLS isn't the only option, though. You could use TLS on setup to share a pre-computed secret between the device and the remote server, then bin the TLS connection. After that, encrypt and forward over HTTP.

Laziness isn't an excuse.

[grkvlt]

FYI, the mechanism you describe is (essentially) how TLS works...