Is their tech a commodity? I knew one of the principals (who was hired away by Uber for an ungodly sum of money) who had spent years writing a lot of proprietary networking code. I don't think that IP is a commodity, is it?
It’s definitely not a commodity in the usual sense that anyone can just buy it. It requires a lot of custom software, and importantly it also requires a lot of negotiations with CDNs and a lot of datacenter buildout to get the requisite amount of points of presence to serve content economically.
But it is a “commodity” in the sense that it’s just a thing that needs to be built to support their product offering, and which other similar companies with similar product offerings have built. Disney+ exists, Hulu exists, Amazon built Prime Video, Google has been operating YouTube for years. If you need to serve streaming video, it’s no longer a groundbreaking feat to be able to do it.
