[0xy]

It's not just playing video. Actually playing the video is easy. Delivering it to the end user is enormously challenging.

Even with a top-shelf CDN, you will have a non-negligible amount of customers having playback issues because of routing issues, peering disputes, congestion etc.

If delivery was easy, Akamai would not be a multi-billion dollar company. Microsoft wouldn't pay them millions, they'd just spin up some content servers themselves.