At first light, the work was mundane and exacting. Atlas converted H.265 to H.264 for legacy clients, created adaptive bitrate renditions for mobile viewers, downscaled the stadium 4K into multiple flavors (2.5 Mbps for meek cellular connections, 12 Mbps for the lounge screen), and repackaged streams into fragmented MP4 and HLS chunks. Packetizers hummed. Timestamps marched. Latency hovered under 500 ms — invisible to most, sacred to those who watched closely.