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It's not bandwidth savings. It's growing the user base. There are lots of people on low bandwidth connections. Maybe now they don't find Netflix watchable,
by martincmartin 8y ago
It's not bandwidth savings. It's growing the user base.
There are lots of people on low bandwidth connections. Maybe now they don't find Netflix watchable, because the video quality is to crappy. But if you can fit higher quality video into the same bandwidth, they'd become users.
I agree with your overall point though, that at some point the extra cost for encode isn't worth it.
- alephnil 8y agoNetflix is in fact working very hard to optimize the quality per bandwidth at low bitrates. Megha Manohara from Netflix had a conference talk about it last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E9xUbcYAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E9xUbcYAM Their goal is to have video of acceptable quality at 250 kbit/s, which makes Netflix an option for a lot more people worldwide.
- spenczar5 8y agoThat's part of it, but I think you'd be astonished at how much IP transit can end up costing when you're distributing high-quality video. It's pretty staggering how much bandwidth can cost. I would not be surprised in the slightest if at least 1/4 of Netflix's total engineering spend is on network transit, so any savings that are per-video can have a huge impact. Source: I work at a company that distributes a lot of high-quality video :)