For over a decade, HTTP Adaptive Streaming was the poster child for how standards should work together. HLS, DASH, and their predecessors succeeded precisely because they embraced HTTP’s caching, took advantage of CDNs, and worked within browser security models. But here’s the inconvenient truth: many of our newest streaming “”innovations”” are systematically breaking this symbiotic relationship. Multi-CDN content steering requires parameterizing URLs (for both media requests and content steering polling) and client/server contracts that inherently and literally remove browser cache from the equation. CMCD v2 abandons JSON sidecar payloads for either query parameters that cache-bust every request or custom headers that trigger double the network requests due to CORS preflight checks. Signed URLs with rotating tokens make browser caching impossible. We’ve become so focused on solving today’s edge cases that we’re undermining the fundamental advantages that made HTTP streaming successful in the first place. In this session, you’ll discover how seemingly innocent streaming standards are creating a hidden performance tax of 2x network requests, cache invalidation, and resource waste. You’ll learn why CORS preflight requests and RFC 9111 cache key requirements are putting streaming engineers in impossible positions, forcing them to choose between security and performance. Most importantly, you’ll walk away with practical strategies using service workers and cache API to work around these issues client-side, plus concrete recommendations for how we can evolve both streaming and web standards to work together instead of against each other. Because the future of streaming isn’t about bypassing the web—it’s about making the web work better for streaming. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2025 in London, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this – learn more at https://demuxed.com