The initial approach was shipping raw video over a WebSocket. I could not imagine putting something like that together and selling it. When your first computer came with 64KB in your entire machine, some of which you can't use at all and some you can't use without bank switching tricks, it's really really hard to even conceive of that architecture as a possibility. It's a testament to the power of today's hardware that it worked at all.
And yet, it did work, and it served as the basis for a successful product. They presumably made money from it. The inefficiency sounds like it didn't get in the way of developing and iterating on the rest of the product.
I can't do it. Premature optimization may be the root of all evil, but I can't work without having some sense for how much data is involved and how much moving or copying is happening to it. That sense would make me immediately reject that approach. I'd go off over-architecting something else before launching, and somebody would get impatient and want their money back.