You jest, but we use Launch Darkly at work, and it’s the shit. Way better than our previous home grown solution. Everyone made the same joke at first, but the value is real

They’ll probably include a manifest with the video, telling the player what time ranges are un-skippable. A script could hook into that, and auto-skip them

I use an Apple TV 4K. For self hosted streaming, I am running Plex on a Raspberry Pi, connected to a Synology NAS, which has my media library

Agreed. 100% would not recommend going this route for a homelab, but it does meet every specified requirement

Used HP ProLiant. It’s nearly 10 years old, but has 16 cores 64GB of RAM, and is just under $150 with free shipping

https://www.ebay.com/itm/235286275608

I bought a 512 GB one of these 5 1/2 years ago, and it’s been reliable. The exception is when I hit ~10% free space a couple times. The drive immediately suffered from horrendous read times, and locked up my system. Worked fine when I freed up enough space. Nowadays, I only use it for extra Steam library storage, since I don’t trust it, but it hasn’t let me down since