That is abstracted. The app (say, VLC Player) reads the file/object from the file system or over HTTP(S) or receives a stream (if content is streamed) and it doesn’t have to worry about what’s going on with bits and bytes on the network.
Let’s say you wanted to create an iOS app that allows one to watch a video that’s stored on the SAFE network.
You could use a traditional way (point it to your Web server app which could serve as a gateway to SAFEnet) so this would happen over HTTP(S) or a streaming protocol served by the Web site.
You could - to make this distributed and “native” build a SAFEnet client support into the video client (someone talked about using safe:// links) or you could use your client’s plugin API to build a SAFEnet plugin for it. Either way, once that is done your client would read the file from safe://net.wo.rk/video.mp4 (which would then fetch data in chunks as appropriate). Note that most clients would get chunks from the closest MaidSafe cache server located near them. The first request would go to vaults with nearest chunks, but if the video remains popular it will be cached (now for free) by nodes in between the client and vault (for each chunk, respectively).
So in short, yes, it’s possible to leverage this to get very good performance (considering the price), but I don’t think you can ever match a good CDN (which is understandable and I think fine - some CNDs are even free and still provide great basic (no encryption, for example) service).
But other parts of the puzzle need to come in place too.
It seems that in absence of a functioning copy protection and ways to effect “takedown notices” and such, one would have to focus on getting as much revenue from live streaming (the first broadcast) which wouldn’t benefit from stored data and perhaps selling “right to retransmit” to traditional Web sites (e.g. a regular Web site wants to stream that content over the Web, charge them per month or per view or whatever).
And then drive traffic to your Web site to make sure everyone knows which of (probably) many copies on SafeNet is served by the actual owner (which is useful as you can get revenue from ads).
Fortunately or not, it seems ad networks will probably become (and remain) one of better ways for content owners to monetize their content (assuming that “reputable” advertisers won’t advertise on sites that store stolen content).
(As requested I won’t go into philosophical battles about copyrights and so on).
EDIT: adding a link that’s relevant to the revenue issue: