4 ms·

Well, the sane way to distribute content when the only thing that has non-negligible costs is production, not distribution, [1] is to have some kind of infrastr

by yk 10y ago

Well, the sane way to distribute content when the only thing that has non-negligible costs is production, not distribution, [1] is to have some kind of infrastructure provider that provides distribution and billing and finances production. However having a monopoly has ugly economic effects and having a single entity that dictates media production has ugly social effects. I guess both Amazon and Netflix try to capture precisely that role, in that case they could charge almost whatever they want while they are not forced by competition to have high quality (and therefore expensive) content. Plus I am afraid that the market tends to produce a monopoly, because a individual subscriber will look for the service that has more content. [1] Hetzner currently charges EUR 1.40 / TB of additional traffic, so marginal distribution costs are in the range of EUR 10^-3 / Movie.

merb 10y ago
> Hetzner currently charges EUR 1.40 / TB of additional traffic, so marginal distribution costs are in the range of EUR 10^-3 / Movie. you can't just use the traffic cost. also if they would on hetzner, their network would be so bad that nobody could've watch netflix. (not that the hetzner network is bad, but it wouldn't withstand the amount of traffic from netflix (especially inter-region traffic is not as cheap as it could be, and also they need to talk with amazon/google about their traffic ("public pricing" is 0,01 USD per GB))) also there are other things that needs to be paid, servers, developers and other staff and stuff. it's not just that you write 20 lines of code and put it on hetzner and can scale globally.
- yk 10y ago
  Of course not, but I am only using Hetzner as some measure of current network costs, because I know Hetzner pricing quite well. So of course I would additionally need server costs, staff, and so on. But if we assume that everything included we end up at a order of magnitude more, your .01 USD/GB, that is still a movie a day for the entire month before we really have to worry about distribution.
chatmasta 10y ago
I'll let you in on a little secret: paying for bandwidth per usage is for suckers. People think this is the only way to pay for bandwidth, but it's really only cloud providers who charge like that (and make a fortune off the racket). If you buy bandwidth from upstream IP transit providers, or rent a server in almost any non-cloud datacenter, you pay for capacity (e.g. $0.50 / Mbps), not usage. That is, you pay for the size of the pipe, not the amount of data going through it. Once you factor in optimizations like peering with ISPs and cross connect caching, bandwidth costs go way down. Also, in Netflix's case, they have a box containing terabytes of their most popular content sitting in almost every datacenter and peering with all major ISPs and backbone providers sharing the cross connect: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

by yk 10y ago

merb 10y ago

> Hetzner currently charges EUR 1.40 / TB of additional traffic, so marginal distribution costs are in the range of EUR 10^-3 / Movie. you can't just use the traffic cost. also if they would on hetzner, their network would be so bad that nobody could've watch netflix. (not that the hetzner network is bad, but it wouldn't withstand the amount of traffic from netflix (especially inter-region traffic is not as cheap as it could be, and also they need to talk with amazon/google about their traffic ("public pricing" is 0,01 USD per GB))) also there are other things that needs to be paid, servers, developers and other staff and stuff. it's not just that you write 20 lines of code and put it on hetzner and can scale globally.

yk 10y ago
Of course not, but I am only using Hetzner as some measure of current network costs, because I know Hetzner pricing quite well. So of course I would additionally need server costs, staff, and so on. But if we assume that everything included we end up at a order of magnitude more, your .01 USD/GB, that is still a movie a day for the entire month before we really have to worry about distribution.

chatmasta 10y ago

I'll let you in on a little secret: paying for bandwidth per usage is for suckers. People think this is the only way to pay for bandwidth, but it's really only cloud providers who charge like that (and make a fortune off the racket). If you buy bandwidth from upstream IP transit providers, or rent a server in almost any non-cloud datacenter, you pay for capacity (e.g. $0.50 / Mbps), not usage. That is, you pay for the size of the pipe, not the amount of data going through it. Once you factor in optimizations like peering with ISPs and cross connect caching, bandwidth costs go way down. Also, in Netflix's case, they have a box containing terabytes of their most popular content sitting in almost every datacenter and peering with all major ISPs and backbone providers sharing the cross connect: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/