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Nobody in here seems to appreciate the networking complexity that Netflix deals with - they are 37% of North America's internet traffic! At that point the netwo
by waffle_ss 8y ago
Nobody in here seems to appreciate the networking complexity that Netflix deals with - they are 37% of North America's internet traffic! At that point the network isn't an abstraction that "just works" like most web apps; you have to be aware of physical and business realities that dictate traffic (e.g. negotiate peering agreements, deploy caching/CDN boxes to network POPs, etc.).
- JetSpiegel 8y agoOr you can buy the CDN service from a myriad of companies in the world. It only takes money to get servers and bandwidth in many places.
- petra 8y agoTrue. But depending on what's you guess on how much it costs for netflix to get a content hour watched by a user(maybe ~$0.1-0.2), streaming costs may become meaningful, and higher streaming costs becomes a strategic disadvantage.
- waffle_ss 8y agoExactly. Excepting Cloudflare which is free, CDNs are expensive (or at least more expensive than I think people realize). Netflix says it uses about 3GB of bandwidth per hour for streaming HD-quality video. CloudFront for one will charge you $0.26 for that 3GB-hour. It's pretty easy to see how binge watchers will rack up pretty high CDN/bandwidth bills.