The early arenas fit in a single .ply on the wire. Newer captures don't. A street block at the resolution we want is tens of megabytes, and the player shouldn't wait for all of it to start driving. Bigger scenes need a delivery protocol, not just a smaller file.

Video solved this with HLS: a manifest of segments at multiple bitrates, the player pulls what it can afford, the playhead never waits on bytes it doesn't yet need. SHLS v0.1 is the same shape for splats — a manifest of chunks at multiple LODs, fetched in priority order via HTTP Range. Byterange packaging collapses ~30× the request count: a scene arrives in three requests instead of a hundred.

The architectural payoff is that the layers don't know about each other. The scheduler scores chunks. The loader fetches bytes. The renderer holds the last good frame. Adding a sixth heuristic later is one more scorer, not a rewrite. We kept it lean for v0.1–v0.2 so the obvious extensions (ADD-mode, multi-codec negotiation) have somewhere to land later.