Yes. The term "innovation" applied to the two ideas bugged me too.
Could be a 'smart people problem' -- easier to 'innovate' a new wheel then visualize how existing tools can be remixed to solve.
For an example of remixing, it was apparent 15 years ago that traditional routing was actively harmful for live and VOD video streaming, so we cobbled a mix of the techniques you listed plus a couple more[1] to connect users to edges in real time based on actual real-time end-to-end conditions.
We did it consciously using these two ideas, plus content aware caching, plus one more "magic" but super trivial idea I still haven't seen elsewhere in the wild.
The low tech rethink worked well, handily outperformed proprietary solutions per industry perf and SLO metrics companies, and it's been an ongoing surprise me that it's taken so long for others to rethink or remix the same way.
We filed no patents, as to your point, this all could be argued evident to anyone 'skilled in the art'.
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1. A couple custom bits: we also had to write an edge server shim as no media server at the time could handle sessions flapping in real time, not to mention the content awareness crucial for giant media files.
Could be a 'smart people problem' -- easier to 'innovate' a new wheel then visualize how existing tools can be remixed to solve.
For an example of remixing, it was apparent 15 years ago that traditional routing was actively harmful for live and VOD video streaming, so we cobbled a mix of the techniques you listed plus a couple more[1] to connect users to edges in real time based on actual real-time end-to-end conditions.
We did it consciously using these two ideas, plus content aware caching, plus one more "magic" but super trivial idea I still haven't seen elsewhere in the wild.
The low tech rethink worked well, handily outperformed proprietary solutions per industry perf and SLO metrics companies, and it's been an ongoing surprise me that it's taken so long for others to rethink or remix the same way.
We filed no patents, as to your point, this all could be argued evident to anyone 'skilled in the art'.
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1. A couple custom bits: we also had to write an edge server shim as no media server at the time could handle sessions flapping in real time, not to mention the content awareness crucial for giant media files.