[notyourday]

It is worse than that.

In order to do streaming well (i.e. to prevent consumers from running away and coming back), one needs take an incoming stream and re-encode it in multiple bit rates - 1080p stream would have not only 8Mbit/sec but also 2Mbit/sec, and 128Kbit/sec qualities. In addition to that for a decent distribution there should also be a 4Mbit/sec and probably 64kbit/sec streams.

As players either hunt down or hunt up, one would be carrying a pretty big number of random cold chunks that are unlikely to be requested again at the edge, which has a negative impact on hit CDN hit rates.