[zoogeny]

I haven't read the entire article, but just based on the snippets you posted it doesn't look like they were streaming video using this process. It sounds like they were doing defect detection.

I would guess this was part of a process when new videos were uploaded and transcoded to different formats. Likely they were taking transcoded frames at some sample rate and uploading them to S3 where some workers were then analyzing the images to look for encoding artifacts.

This would most likely be a one-time sanity check for new videos that have to go through some conversion pipelines. However, once converted to their final form I would suspect the video files are statically distributed using a CDN.