[mrmufungo]

Not a stupid question at all! I actually looked into byte-range requests as opposed to downloading individual segments, indeed Amazon S3 does support byte-range requests. I would think it's similar to implement, and wouldn't have as many moving parts.

When I had started the project, I saw how other streaming sites fetched their audio, and I saw a pattern in individual GET requests for segments. I thought, "Hey, they're doing this for a reason, and even though I don't fully understand this reason, maybe I should do it to." At the time, I think I justified it by thinking that someone who wants to rip the stream file would have to piece the track together versus just requesting the full track.

In the end, it really doesn't matter: anyone who is willed enough can get whatever is being sent to their client. It's one of those moments where I didn't bother to really think it through and factor in the practicality aspect. I'd like to go back and re-visit byte-range requests, though, just to see how it would work differently.

[icebraining]

MPEG-DASH and HLS both use segments. I think one reason is to allow for dynamic quality switching: if the bandwidth drops, the player can simply start pulling segments encoded at a lower bitrate. This is harder to do with byte-range, since bytes don't map to time cleanly.