The article suggests that this is for live streaming shows. Would a CDN based approach work in this use case?

Take a look at KinkLive.com. We were the first porn company to do live streaming in HD using a CDN (Bitgravity), all paid for, by the minute, with a micro currency system (kinks) that we built.

Very interesting! Thanks for your reply. Have you ever posted or discussed your infrastructure before?

I've posted about small parts of it in various places, but not the whole experience. I no longer work there (since April 2010), so while I know they still use quite a bit of the serving infrastructure that I built, my knowledge is now quite a bit out of date.

One fun bit that I built is called the cockblocker (as you can imagine, we used all sorts of fun names for internal projects). People who repeatedly attempt to hack the system (usually through various forms of abuse like failed login attempts) would automatically get their IP address routed to /dev/null.

With these amounts of bandwidth, does that still make sense? Sounds like this was a one-man job that worked.

I'm not really sure what you mean, but absolutely using a CDN product is the way to go when you want to sell your content on a global scale. Otherwise, you are going to deal with having to build / maintain your own and the cost of doing that is far higher than just letting other experts deal with the issues that surround it.

I've always been curious, how is working for a porn company affected your social life? does it at all?

I worked behind the camera, not in front of it. Sorry, I'm not interested in satisfying your curiosities.