[dandongus]

I think most people here are vastly, vastly overestimating the size of the videos with all this talk about buffering in the comments.

The average video on tiktok, at least for the webapp version, appears to be around 1 megabit (0.125 megabytes) per second when the h264 option is used, and only half of that rate when using ByteDance's 'own' (essentially hevc) format.

I would reckon nearly all internet users, even many mobile ones, have more than enough bandwidth (and low enough latency and loss) to stream many of these tiktok videos in real time simultaneously, let alone a single one at a time.

Tiktok's backend infrastructure may be impressive, but the same could be said for the other companies you listed such as Google.