Comment by kd5bjo

Back in the Justin.tv days, we used this for some messages that were passed by the client between two of our systems: The main authentication was done by the web stack which gave the client an HMAC-signed viewing authorization. That was then passed on to the video servers which knew how to check the authorization but weren’t hooked up to the main DB.

Setting things up this way meant that we didn’t need to muck about with the video server code whenever we made policy changes as well as isolating the video system from web stack failures— If the web servers or DB went down, no new viewers could start up a stream but anyone already watching could continue uninterrupted.