Say you're on vacation and you've just recorded a fairly large video of yourself skydiving for the first time, naturally, you'd want to send it to a friend or family member on the other side of the world. After the upload finishes and the video eventually reaches them, they press Play and marvel in the moment, re-living the experience with you.
That sounds like a trivial thing to do, but somewhere between the press of both buttons a plethora of things have happened.
The video had to make it through your shitty internet connection, travel somewhere to be stored, possibly be processed into different formats and qualities, and eventually make its way to someone thousands of kilometres away in a form their device can actually play.
And somehow, most of this happens without either of you having to think about it.
That simple journey from uploading to playing the video is what we're going to unpack.
