You need a compliance department and attorneys to look over licenses and agreements. It's a real hassle and not really related to cost of the license itself.
The only patch to FreeBSD I maintained was hacking up FreeBSD 2.x to embed Hughes mSQL to back getpwnam etc and radius/tacass. I also needed to exceed the uid limit and came up with hacky uid for the customer and gid as the account letting each customer have the 30k or whatever account ids. I shared the idea with friends at Teleport ISP in Portland who ended up doing something similar with Oracle I think. I think the same sort of thing lead to vservers that best.net used with BSDi and eventually FreeBSD jails was developed and significantly better than my hack job so I migrated the isp over to using jails.
Another observation, using the host cpu to manage the nvme storage for vod content is also a bottleneck. You can use the liqid 8x nvme pcie cards and address them directly from the bluefield3 arm processes using nvme-of. You are then just limited by pcie 5 switch capacity among the 10-20 shared nvme/bluefield3 cards.
I haven’t read post yet but I used to work in this space @cable. The nice bit with bluefield3 is you can run nginx on the on-board arm cores which have sufficient ram for live hls usecase. You can use liqid pcie fabric and support 20 bluefield nics off a single cpu 1u box. You essentially turn the 1u box into a mid-tier cache for the nics. Doing this I was able to generate 120 gig off each nic off a 1u hp + the pcie fabric/cards. I worked with liqid and hp lab here in Colorado prototyping it. Edit: I ran the cdn edge directly on nic using yocto linix.
I worked for another company creditnet.com that started a bit before authorize.net basically wrapped ICVerify dialup verification using PGP to encrypt merchant to processor request/response.