This is nice if you only have to deliver in one format, but as soon as you want to show up on TVs you are stuck delivering in a lot of formats, and life gets complicated quickly.
Throw subtitles in multiple languages, and different audio tracks, into the mix, and all of a sudden streaming video becomes a nightmare.
Finally, if you are dealing with copyrighted materials, you have to be aware as to what country your user is physically residing in while accessing the videos, as you likely don't have a license to stream all your videos in every country all at once.
Throw this all into a blender and what is needed is a very fancy asset catalog management system, and that part right there ends up being annoyingly complicated.
Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Many parts of on-demand video streaming are largely commoditized at this point. Add in support for linear (live) streaming and ad insertion and things start to get really interesting. :)
My very first job was writing streaming media services for radio. Integrating the ad services over events embedded into the stream identifying content was a pretty nifty solution. You send the metadata to your ad server, it selects the ads based on your user and media metadata, you swap out the player's media url to play the ad(s), and keep the stream going in the background. When the commercial break is up, you kill the ad stream and swap the media stream player back in. Presto changeo, seamless ads in 2007.
You also track media playback through the stream embedded events.
The hard part back then was live video/audio encoding. These cards lived at the stations, and streamed to our cdn. Geocoding for American service bases in foreign countries was interesting too, the streaming rights for stuff limits the countries you can stream in.
Monitoring the live encoders was an interesting problem - I setup an event-based solution so I could capture the audio waveform and analyze the frequency buckets on dozens of streams at once. Could tell if a stream was silent pretty quickly, and alert the station engineer via email.
Back then, a lot of this stuff wasn't off the shelf like it was today. Even on the frontend,working with Flash, window's media player sdk, and the QuickTime sdk and integrating it with Javascript was challenging. And the backends were all in php and Java 1.4, and mysql, and a whole lot of memcache.
Was a really great experience for a new professional programmer to write all that.
In 2007 and i would argue before that, live media encoding for streams was pretty much a solved problem but it was often very expensive, and out of reach of radio stations and the information wasn't readily accessible so you could potentially end up giving Microsoft or Real networks lots of money.
I was working on streaming in the late 90s - that was real wild west, had to write solutions myself, and it felt very duck taped together. Luckily it was an offshoot of a largish ISP so we had bandwidth and a lot of servers. incoming streams often used bonded ISDN lines.
My background is in linear (title VI and OTT) and ad-insertion. A big chunk of my job is explaining to folks that just because you solved VOD that doesn't mean you've solved linear. It's almost best to think of them as two distinct problems.
I’ve built or been involved in building 4 closed source media asset management systems ( including my current place of work and one I cofounded) and you can get relatively far in the first month.
But the devil is in the details and most people that attempt it don’t even get the database models right on the first or second time, they underestimate the complexity particularly when it comes to video and struggle when the use cases widen. Document asset management systems are way easier but usually don’t understand media as in depth as a media asset management system.
Throw subtitles in multiple languages, and different audio tracks, into the mix, and all of a sudden streaming video becomes a nightmare.
Finally, if you are dealing with copyrighted materials, you have to be aware as to what country your user is physically residing in while accessing the videos, as you likely don't have a license to stream all your videos in every country all at once.
Throw this all into a blender and what is needed is a very fancy asset catalog management system, and that part right there ends up being annoyingly complicated.