Its not just that it can be cached, but that it can use very standard existing infrastructure like HTTP CDNs, mobile browsers, etc. The limitation is that the audio/video is encoded as segments, each a few seconds long. Because of this it looks kind of like serial batch processing with latency constraints based on the batch size (segment duration). This is in contrast to say webrtc or rtmp thats a lot closer to a multiplexed stream of data.
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Its not just that it can be cached, but that it can use very standard existing infrastructure like HTTP CDNs, mobile browsers, etc. The limitation is that the audio/video is encoded as segments, each a few seconds long. Because of this it looks kind of like serial batch processing with latency constraints based on the batch size (segment duration). This is in contrast to say webrtc or rtmp thats a lot closer to a multiplexed stream of data.