Comment by hamburglar

A long time ago I used it to work around an iOS limitation that prevented apps from simultaneously streaming audio and caching it. You could give the media player a URL for a remote stream, but you couldn’t read the same stream. The alternative was to get the stream yourself and implement your own media player. I didn’t want to write my own media player, so I requested the stream myself in order to cache it, plus fed it back to the OS media player via localhost http. Total hack, but it worked great. I wonder if they ever took that code out. It’s got hundreds of millions of installs at this point.