Inside the Tech That Powers Your Favorite Video-Streaming Services

People tend to think of video-streaming giants like Netflix and Hulu as entertainment providers, but they're also global tech companies. Underneath the new season of a show you're binging or a live-streamed March Madness game with millions of concurrent viewers are evolving user interfaces, high-powered backend data operations, and complex streaming-video pipelines.Our cover story in this month's PCMag Digital Edition breaks down the increasingly competitive video-streaming landscape and how new services rolled out by big tech companies such as Apple and media conglomerates including AT&T, Comcast, and Disney are creating a content-industrial complex for consumers.We spoke to execs from Amazon Prime Video, CBS, Disney, and Hulu (Netflix declined multiple interview requests), as well as experts and analysts, about the content, technology, and market forces shaping this fast-evolving industry melding the tech and entertainment worlds. This companion story dives into the tech side of streaming.At the heart of the technical complexity is one simple truth: The internet wasn't built to stream high-quality video to millions of people."People talk about the technology as if we just push all the TV over the internet. It's not set up to do that," said streaming media consultant and expert Dan Rayburn. "The internet was not built to deliver video at great quality in large scale; it can't physically handle it."