As you are likely aware we grew in single a week from a few hundred streams to 30k concurrent streams. While the platform can scale to 30k (or higher!), our primary expense is the cost of bandwidth. We took the time late last week to install some new hardware. The notable component here are (newish) NVIDIA encoders. The newer encoder is a Turing based encoder and we are trying to take advantage of optimizations in the encoder to reduce our cost to serve. At the moment we are switching to using B-frames on most of our encoders. This should in theory reduce our cost to serve these files on the HD channels by up to 30% by making the files that much smaller. In theory this should not come with a reduction in quality but let me know if you notice it. Similarly when applied to the 480i channels (the sub channels) the improvement is far more dramatic, with an 70-80% reduction in file size. While fewer people watch sub channels compared to the HD ones but since the upgrade we have been able to add close to a dozen sub channels, which should give you more content options.
Beyond cost the smaller files of more predictable size should also result in smoother playback overall.