[sudhirj]

Stashing files–let's say that each file is one second long and is just numbered with the unix timestamp – makes things cost effective because now the server is just dropping files no 1,2,3,4... into a directory, and everyone is pulling them out in sequence the way an other file would be downloaded. This also allows exploiting the HTTP architecture – if you set the Cache-Control: public headers on the files (which you can do happily because they'll never change) they'll be cached at lots of places along the way, like CDNs, the local ISP, the office network, etc. HTTPS blew out most of these caching benefits, but at least the CDNs can cache the files at edges all over the world.