Network filesystems

Actually, that's a good example. In the past, people set up proprietary "video streaming servers" for this use case. Turns out, they don't scale, they are expensive, and they have lots of problems.

So people decided "what if we just used HTTP?" Apple made HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), and Adobe/Microsoft made similar knockoffs.

The idea was that any video (even live streams) can be encoded in chunks (usually 5s of video). Instead of a farm of specialized (and usually badly optimized) video streamers, you just use a farm of HTTP servers, copying in the segments as you go. The clients can benefit from HTTP caches, etc.

The same thing could work for CCNx: An intermediate node could forward one request for the next segment of the live stream, and satisfy multiple requesters. This may use more bandwidth at the edge (where it's usually not scarce) but the intermediate nodes will keep much less state. (I.e. once they satisfy the current segment, they keep no state until clients start requesting the next segment.)