My thoughts exactly. While this is more human readable on the wire, a message broker delivering the feed would provide many different other features that might be useful, such as transactions, load-balancing, guaranteed delivery and per-endpoint state to simplify the individual application instances.

For those not aware of what message brokers are, there are many to choose from such as: Mosquito, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Solace... If delivery over HTTP is a requirement, many of these brokers support delivery over websockets or (in the case of Solace) also support long polling.