Apple's HLS made streaming work over ordinary HTTP chunks, and it won

Delivering live video over the internet once meant UDP-based protocols that firewalls, proxies and many networks would not let through, and required dedicated streaming infrastructure.

Apple released HTTP Live Streaming in 2009. It segments the stream into short files and serves a playlist over standard HTTP, so conventional web servers and content delivery networks can deliver it. It was formally documented as RFC 8216 in 2017.

Stream by downloading files, not by holding a live pipe

HTTP is already permitted through firewalls and proxies, so no special port or protocol is needed.

Serving static files off a normal web server and CDN is simple and scales, unlike dedicated streaming servers.

The master playlist lists several bitrates so a player can adapt smoothly to changing bandwidth.

Being a de facto standard meant media players, browsers and mobile devices all support it out of the box.

When a heavy channel gets blocked by infrastructure, carry it over the one channel everything already allows: plain HTTP turns a special server into a static file server.

HLS became the most popular streaming format, supported across media players, browsers and devices. Apple later added byte-range addressing for fragmented MP4 and low-latency features, aligning it with MPEG-DASH.