9 ms·

Netflix Now The Largest Single Source of Internet Traffic In North America

201 points by ssclafani 15y ago

megamark16 15y ago
It's certainly the largest single source of internet traffic at our house, and within that subset, streaming Dora the Explorer Season 1 is the largest single source of internet traffic coming from Netflix.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I literally know about four or five people that have Netflix almost purely to stream Dora and Thomas.
  - synnik 15y ago
    ... or Beakman's World, Dr. Who, and McGyver.
  - ktsmith 15y ago
    Our netflix usage is 99.5% kids shows. Pretty much all the PBS cartoons are on there, NOVA Science now is on there, Thomas and Friends, Dora the Explorer etc. We use hundreds of GB every month streaming media and have no plans on going back to cable or satellite. My wife can get some of her shows via hulu at her desk, some of them on the TV and if she is patient she'll get a whole season at once on netflix. That being said, we'd use even more bandwidth with Netflix if their on demand streaming selection didn't suck for more recent releases. I don't watch a ton of older movies and those I do want to watch over and over again I own on DVD or Bluray which I would prefer to use since the quality is better and there's never any buffering problems.
    - adamc 15y ago
      Not to mention that young kids will watch shows over and over and over again. When my daughter (now 11) was that age, we mostly used DVDs, but these days netflix would be a fabulous investment for meeting that need.
      - ktsmith 15y ago
        Beyond watching the same thing over and over again, his tastes will change suddenly. We've gone through a phase where he was into nothing but Toy Story, followed shortly by Cars, then back to Toy Story, then Thomas, and now back to Cars. We aren't purchasing nearly as many DVDs as I had anticipated because he's perfectly happy watching Hero of the Rails or Misty Island Rescue another time and both are streaming. By having a variety of kids shows available we are also saving quite a bit on disc replacement costs. He can work the PS3 but doesn't really get that touching the bottom of the $30 Bluray discs is not a good idea.
        megamark16 15y ago
        Oh man, Misty Island Rescue is one of my son's favorites. He's on a Leapfrog kick right now, but we'll see how long that lasts.
- larrik 15y ago
  Dora (etc) works magic at restaurants with fussy toddlers. iPhone + 3G + handy stand = quiet(ish) meal.
mey 15y ago
Interesting what AWS can do at scale. Also important to design for the system limitations. Edit: rewrite
- aramadia 15y ago
  It is highly unlikely AWS can handle that kind of load. AWS may be responsible for the netflix interface, but video streaming (the bulk of the data) is handled by CDNs such as Akamai.
- mdasen 15y ago
  Netflix isn't using AWS for their bandwidth. The media files themselves are being served by Level 3's CDN (http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/11/us-levelthree-idUSTRE6AA3IQ20101111 http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/11/us-levelthree-idUS...). Netflix is using Amazon for a lot of their application servers, but when you're serving as much bandwidth as Netflix is, you go with a CDN for media distribution. That's not to say AWS is bad or anything, just that AWS isn't supporting all that bandwidth for Netflix.
  - dmuino 15y ago
    That is mostly correct. Most of the traffic is coming from the CDNs. But we also use Akamai and Limelight in addition to Level3.
  - mey 15y ago
    Thanks for the clarification.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    Are the files encrypted before placement on the CDN or does the CDN handle the DRM?
    - LokiSnake 15y ago
      I believe the processing (and probably encryption) is done before the CDN using EC2 or some similar service.
thematt 15y ago
I find these benchmarks slightly confusing. There are protocols/technologies mixed in with applications (or sites). Isn't there going to be huge overlap in these? Facebook vs. HTTP? Flash video vs. YouTube?
- corin_ 15y ago
  My assumption is that it's shorthand, as in "HTTP" actually means "HTTP excluding <others on list>". Could be wrong.
  - ericmoritz 15y ago
    Likely what they mean by HTTP is HTML(and related) over HTTP
- stcredzero 15y ago
  I find these benchmarks slightly confusing. There are protocols/technologies mixed in with applications (or sites). This is the opposite of ordinary end-users, who have problems distinguishing between protocols, technologies, applications, and sites.
  - javanix 15y ago
    What does this have to do with anything?
    - stcredzero 15y ago
      If you're trying to have a go at a web startup, probably everything.
yalogin 15y ago
And it does not even have the latest movies available for streaming. By latest I mean good interesting movies released in the last year or two. It does better with TV shows but still does not have many shows. All I am saying is the traffic is only going to go up.
danohuiginn 15y ago
"That puts Netflix above HTTP websites (18 percent), BitTorrent (11 percent), and YouTube (10 percent) as a source of downstream traffic during peak times in North America. (BitTorrent still accounts for half of all upstream traffic)" I don't understand this -- surely every downstream requires a corresponding upstream? Are they only counting upstream from domestic users? Or is the vast majority of bittorrent traffic to american users coming from seeders outside the US?
- beaumartinez 15y ago
  Upstream: sending data. Downstream: receiving data. With HTTP and media streaming you send very little data ("I'd like this web page, please") and you receive lots ("here's the entire content of the web page"). With BitTorrent you send lots of data (fragments of files to other peers) and you receive lots (the fragments of files you're missing).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - koenigdavidmj 15y ago
    With HTTP you still send an ACK for every incoming packet. A friend of mine at university was the technically minded person at his fraternity, and he found that just the outgoing ACK:s were saturating the DSL line. Media streaming might be done over UDP, depending on the protocol, which should alleviate this a bit.
    - Dylan16807 15y ago
      You don't need an ACK for every incoming packet. But even if you send that many you're looking at 40-64 bytes out per 1400+ bytes in.
      - koenigdavidmj 15y ago
        And now I have my stupid typo all over the Internet under my real name. How embarrassing. (Worse---I work for a network appliances company!)
pstack 15y ago
I can't wait to see this all come to a head. Netflix's CEO isn't shy about calling the industry out on their bullshit, while the industry continues to lie about available bandwidth -- insisting that it is very limited, near maximum capacity, and very expensive (none of which is intrinsically true and only artificially so by their own machinations). Netflix could end up doing a lot of good for the consumer beyond just providing entertainment at an affordable price, at the rate they're going.
jasonmcalacanis 15y ago
If find it hard to believe that the free YouTube, which gets 500M uniques a month--over 100k in the US alone--gets less traffic than Netflix with 23m members. US traffic stats http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com http://www.quantcast.com/netflix.com http://www.quantcast.com/netflix.com 11m (obviously doesn't count xbox and apps, etc) Really minutes spent is the most important factor to look at. with 5x the uniques, and being free, I wonder how total minutes spent with netflix content compares to youtube's.
- johnbaker 15y ago
  That's exactly what I was thinking. This doesn't add up, netflix can make that much traffic, given that only 7m of their subscribers actually use online viewing. This very suspicious IMHO, netflix doesn't even appear in april's comscore report.
  - cowkingdeluxe 15y ago
    You're not taking into account quality of picture. I use about 150gb a month from netflix (it has replaced my cable).
- scott_s 15y ago
  Usages are completely different. People look at a few YouTube videos in a given day, usually at low quality for a few minutes. Some people, like me and many people I know, have completely replaced cable and network tv with Netflix. Streaming an episode of Lost at 720p is going to take up a lot of bandwidth.
  - brianpan 15y ago
    Agreed, it's bandwidth and the duration. In our household, we watch many 20-40 minute shows in a day. Probably a total of 2-10 hours depending on the day. We also watch lots of youtube videos, but it's 1-5 minute videos which amount to a total of 30 minutes or an hour a day.
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago
Lewisham 15y ago
I hope we can now have the MPAA and RIAA realize that, actually, most people do want to pay, they don't choose to pirate because they are all inherently bad, and they don't need to be sued from the face of the Earth to show how bad they are. What changed is what the customers value, and how much they will pay for it. The $9 I spend a month on Netflix is $108 a year, which is far more than I have paid for DVDs in the past. I don't value owning physical media or individual movies, I value streaming and libraries. But, of course, why change now? Why should the RIAA bother trying to get Spotify-like services launched in the US? Who needs evidence and metrics when you can have vitriol and blame?
- leftnode 15y ago
  You're exactly right and this really hammered it home for me; the generation today is not into owning a physical piece of media. In the 70's, owning an LP was awesome (and necessary) because there was usually some effort put into the artwork. Today, no one wants to own a mass produced DVD/BluRay Disc with shitty artwork and no liner notes. Some CD's still come with good artwork, but the generation now values owning digital media.
  - Unseelie 15y ago
    > the generation now values owning digital media I think you've missed the point, it isn't about ownership at all, or even that the media is digital. Its that what we value is access to the media. We're willing to pay a nominal fee for access to it, but that's really all we care about: Having the media play when we want it to. Ownership of the media is irrelevant to our experience of the media...unless not owning it means we cannot experience it.
    - Lewisham 15y ago
      Yes, this was what I was getting at. I don't want or need to have some physical object that tells me "this is my media". We've been through enough format changes to understand that "this is my media for ten years, then I'll need to convert it or buy it again." Access is the key, not ownership. That being said, I am deeply concerned about central media control allowing companies and governments to become revisionist; editing out controversial portions of various works as they see fit. I would like to see legislation that would prevent that.
d0ne 15y ago
Interesting to note that Google ( Youtube was known to loose money so I am not including it for the rest of this comment ) is no where to be found but FB is on all 3 list. FB isn't getting more $ per ad than Google ( probably less ) but their underlying technical cost to handle an individual users is apparently far greater.
ck2 15y ago
So since netflix is being the single best provider with virtually no "all you can eat" competitors and their userbase is ever growing - how long until a price increase? At 25 million subscribers, means for every $1 increase they will get another $300 Million a year. That's too tempting to resist, no?
- ktsmith 15y ago
  At $8/mo I have no problem with paying for Netflix for what I can get out of it right now. We get all of our sons content from Netflix and my wife can get some of the TV shows she liks from Netflix. I would probably pay up to $10/mo for what is currently available. However I would be really aware of every price increase due to the fact that 99.9% of what I want to watch is DVD only. It sounds crazy since $10/mo isn't really that much money, but anything over that and I'd probably cancel the service due to the poor selection of recent titles and the only "ok" quality of the video stream. edit: I should add that we are on the verge of cancelling Hulu due to the large number of device restrictions. We don't care much for the back catalog of shows or movies so there's no value in that. When we also can't stream a show to the TV and have to watch it on the PC that's a disincentive to use the product.
- awj 15y ago
  Except that the price is likely a factor in all three of the reason you've cited. There's no real competitors because Netflix does a great job off an already low price. They have the market and are serving it well. That's ridiculously difficult to break into. Their growing userbase is possibly as much a result of the price as it is the features, so upping that jeopardizes that position as well. You are right, though. In many companies that would be too tempting to resist. From what I've seen it looks like Netflix's CEO has loftier goals than even what they're doing now. I'd like to think he plans on focusing on having enough money to keep building the market for a bit longer before switching gears to caching in.
romey 15y ago
I wonder if this data will change anything about the argument for net neutrality? The big telecom companies were already complaining about companies like netflix, skype, google etc. making huge piles of money by driving lots traffic and pulling lots of bandwidth for users; I'm sure Comcast wouldn't mind being able to charge customers a premium for a "Comcast Netflix package" with faster movie loading times, etc.
Apocryphon 15y ago
List of products/services that show that crusading anti-piracy media publishing companies are full of it: Netflix, Steam, Hulu, O'Reilly Media, that one anime streaming service that was covered previously by Ars Technica... who else?
tobylane 15y ago
iPlayer is the British equal (not equivalent - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...) with no recent data, and they intend on expanding at the ISPs cost http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/11/18/bbc-system-to-name-and-shame-uk-isps-that-throttle-iplayer-broadband-traffic.html http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/11/18/bbc-system-to-na...
code_duck 15y ago
'Facebook' is something that can be compared to 'HTTP' or 'ssl'? That second chart is deplorable. Whomever created that needs to go to some sort of remedial school to study making sense.
alienfluid 15y ago
Thinking about this from a technical point of view, would it make sense for Netflix (or even ISPs) to put in content-aware routers than can cache frequently requested bits? Won't this help, to a certain extent, alleviate the congestion? Of course, the assumption here is that for a large enough population, you will have more than one person requesting the same content in a given time period.
- Retric 15y ago
  Netflix provides machines to Large ISP's to reduce congestion. I don't know the specifics, but I suspect both Netflix and the ISP save money by doing so.
- etcet 15y ago
  Netflix uses a variety of CDNs (Content Delivery Network). I think Level 3 is currently their primary provider and they used to use Akamai. I'd say there's a fat chance of seeing Comcast benevolently caching Netflix traffic.
- dmuino 15y ago
  As I mentioned elsewhere Netflix does use Level3, Akamai, and Limelight. So the traffic is mainly coming from CDNs. I'm not sure if by "content-aware routers" you mean something like Content Centric Networking: http://www.ccnx.org/ http://www.ccnx.org/ If that's the case it'd be up to the ISPs to push that technology to their infrastructure. Van Jacobson gave a very informative presentation at Netflix about it a couple of months ago. It seems you can watch a similar presentation he gave at Google on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8
- squeed 15y ago
  At least two of Netflix's three CDNs place servers or connections within the ISPs. Akamai has servers deployed within almost every ISP, and Limelight has peering connections to their datacenters. I'm not sure about Level3 (and they've been pretty tight-lipped given the Comcast brouhaha). Rather than caching on the router side, I believe most of the magic happens in the load-balancing side. The effect (to the end-user) is the same, though.
kahawe 15y ago
Over here in Euroland, we can only cry ourselves to sleep until they finally stream movies over here! Could we please ditch the pre-historic distribution and TV stations already and switch to a more demand-oriented paradigm?
- JoeP 15y ago
  I know it sounds like a pain in the ass, but I've got a somewhat stable solution. Invest in a good VPN with several US based end-points (I like StrongVPN myself) which by itself will allow you to watch normal Hulu. I personally then go a little further and use a US based mail forwarder (which I use for several other things, not just this) to sign up for Hulu+ and Netflix. It costs me about $20 per month, plus the standard cost of Hulu+ and Netflix obviously.
  - OPAS 15y ago
    That's a great idea! Why is it costing you $20/month? You can get a US forwarding address with no monthly maintenance fee here: http://bit.ly/f4v9Je http://bit.ly/f4v9Je
mattraibert 15y ago
> most of the video to the home is cached on the edge of the network rather than going through the backbone. I'd like to know more about what this means exactly. Do they have complete copies of their streaming library all over the place so that everyone is downloading from a relatively local source?

201 points by ssclafani 15y ago

It's certainly the largest single source of internet traffic at our house, and within that subset, streaming Dora the Explorer Season 1 is the largest single source of internet traffic coming from Netflix.

kenjackson 15y ago
I literally know about four or five people that have Netflix almost purely to stream Dora and Thomas.
- synnik 15y ago
  ... or Beakman's World, Dr. Who, and McGyver.
- ktsmith 15y ago
  Our netflix usage is 99.5% kids shows. Pretty much all the PBS cartoons are on there, NOVA Science now is on there, Thomas and Friends, Dora the Explorer etc. We use hundreds of GB every month streaming media and have no plans on going back to cable or satellite. My wife can get some of her shows via hulu at her desk, some of them on the TV and if she is patient she'll get a whole season at once on netflix. That being said, we'd use even more bandwidth with Netflix if their on demand streaming selection didn't suck for more recent releases. I don't watch a ton of older movies and those I do want to watch over and over again I own on DVD or Bluray which I would prefer to use since the quality is better and there's never any buffering problems.
  - adamc 15y ago
    Not to mention that young kids will watch shows over and over and over again. When my daughter (now 11) was that age, we mostly used DVDs, but these days netflix would be a fabulous investment for meeting that need.
    - ktsmith 15y ago
      Beyond watching the same thing over and over again, his tastes will change suddenly. We've gone through a phase where he was into nothing but Toy Story, followed shortly by Cars, then back to Toy Story, then Thomas, and now back to Cars. We aren't purchasing nearly as many DVDs as I had anticipated because he's perfectly happy watching Hero of the Rails or Misty Island Rescue another time and both are streaming. By having a variety of kids shows available we are also saving quite a bit on disc replacement costs. He can work the PS3 but doesn't really get that touching the bottom of the $30 Bluray discs is not a good idea.
      - megamark16 15y ago
        Oh man, Misty Island Rescue is one of my son's favorites. He's on a Leapfrog kick right now, but we'll see how long that lasts.
larrik 15y ago
Dora (etc) works magic at restaurants with fussy toddlers. iPhone + 3G + handy stand = quiet(ish) meal.

mey 15y ago

Interesting what AWS can do at scale. Also important to design for the system limitations. Edit: rewrite

aramadia 15y ago
It is highly unlikely AWS can handle that kind of load. AWS may be responsible for the netflix interface, but video streaming (the bulk of the data) is handled by CDNs such as Akamai.
mdasen 15y ago
Netflix isn't using AWS for their bandwidth. The media files themselves are being served by Level 3's CDN (http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/11/us-levelthree-idUSTRE6AA3IQ20101111 http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/11/us-levelthree-idUS...). Netflix is using Amazon for a lot of their application servers, but when you're serving as much bandwidth as Netflix is, you go with a CDN for media distribution. That's not to say AWS is bad or anything, just that AWS isn't supporting all that bandwidth for Netflix.
- dmuino 15y ago
  That is mostly correct. Most of the traffic is coming from the CDNs. But we also use Akamai and Limelight in addition to Level3.
- mey 15y ago
  Thanks for the clarification.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  Are the files encrypted before placement on the CDN or does the CDN handle the DRM?
  - LokiSnake 15y ago
    I believe the processing (and probably encryption) is done before the CDN using EC2 or some similar service.

thematt 15y ago

I find these benchmarks slightly confusing. There are protocols/technologies mixed in with applications (or sites). Isn't there going to be huge overlap in these? Facebook vs. HTTP? Flash video vs. YouTube?

corin_ 15y ago
My assumption is that it's shorthand, as in "HTTP" actually means "HTTP excluding <others on list>". Could be wrong.
- ericmoritz 15y ago
  Likely what they mean by HTTP is HTML(and related) over HTTP
stcredzero 15y ago
I find these benchmarks slightly confusing. There are protocols/technologies mixed in with applications (or sites). This is the opposite of ordinary end-users, who have problems distinguishing between protocols, technologies, applications, and sites.
- javanix 15y ago
  What does this have to do with anything?
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    If you're trying to have a go at a web startup, probably everything.

yalogin 15y ago

And it does not even have the latest movies available for streaming. By latest I mean good interesting movies released in the last year or two. It does better with TV shows but still does not have many shows. All I am saying is the traffic is only going to go up.

danohuiginn 15y ago

"That puts Netflix above HTTP websites (18 percent), BitTorrent (11 percent), and YouTube (10 percent) as a source of downstream traffic during peak times in North America. (BitTorrent still accounts for half of all upstream traffic)" I don't understand this -- surely every downstream requires a corresponding upstream? Are they only counting upstream from domestic users? Or is the vast majority of bittorrent traffic to american users coming from seeders outside the US?

beaumartinez 15y ago
Upstream: sending data. Downstream: receiving data. With HTTP and media streaming you send very little data ("I'd like this web page, please") and you receive lots ("here's the entire content of the web page"). With BitTorrent you send lots of data (fragments of files to other peers) and you receive lots (the fragments of files you're missing).
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- koenigdavidmj 15y ago
  With HTTP you still send an ACK for every incoming packet. A friend of mine at university was the technically minded person at his fraternity, and he found that just the outgoing ACK:s were saturating the DSL line. Media streaming might be done over UDP, depending on the protocol, which should alleviate this a bit.
  - Dylan16807 15y ago
    You don't need an ACK for every incoming packet. But even if you send that many you're looking at 40-64 bytes out per 1400+ bytes in.
    - koenigdavidmj 15y ago
      And now I have my stupid typo all over the Internet under my real name. How embarrassing. (Worse---I work for a network appliances company!)

pstack 15y ago

I can't wait to see this all come to a head. Netflix's CEO isn't shy about calling the industry out on their bullshit, while the industry continues to lie about available bandwidth -- insisting that it is very limited, near maximum capacity, and very expensive (none of which is intrinsically true and only artificially so by their own machinations). Netflix could end up doing a lot of good for the consumer beyond just providing entertainment at an affordable price, at the rate they're going.

jasonmcalacanis 15y ago

If find it hard to believe that the free YouTube, which gets 500M uniques a month--over 100k in the US alone--gets less traffic than Netflix with 23m members. US traffic stats http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com http://www.quantcast.com/netflix.com http://www.quantcast.com/netflix.com 11m (obviously doesn't count xbox and apps, etc) Really minutes spent is the most important factor to look at. with 5x the uniques, and being free, I wonder how total minutes spent with netflix content compares to youtube's.

johnbaker 15y ago
That's exactly what I was thinking. This doesn't add up, netflix can make that much traffic, given that only 7m of their subscribers actually use online viewing. This very suspicious IMHO, netflix doesn't even appear in april's comscore report.
- cowkingdeluxe 15y ago
  You're not taking into account quality of picture. I use about 150gb a month from netflix (it has replaced my cable).
scott_s 15y ago
Usages are completely different. People look at a few YouTube videos in a given day, usually at low quality for a few minutes. Some people, like me and many people I know, have completely replaced cable and network tv with Netflix. Streaming an episode of Lost at 720p is going to take up a lot of bandwidth.
- brianpan 15y ago
  Agreed, it's bandwidth and the duration. In our household, we watch many 20-40 minute shows in a day. Probably a total of 2-10 hours depending on the day. We also watch lots of youtube videos, but it's 1-5 minute videos which amount to a total of 30 minutes or an hour a day.
Florin_Andrei 15y ago

Lewisham 15y ago

I hope we can now have the MPAA and RIAA realize that, actually, most people do want to pay, they don't choose to pirate because they are all inherently bad, and they don't need to be sued from the face of the Earth to show how bad they are. What changed is what the customers value, and how much they will pay for it. The $9 I spend a month on Netflix is $108 a year, which is far more than I have paid for DVDs in the past. I don't value owning physical media or individual movies, I value streaming and libraries. But, of course, why change now? Why should the RIAA bother trying to get Spotify-like services launched in the US? Who needs evidence and metrics when you can have vitriol and blame?

leftnode 15y ago
You're exactly right and this really hammered it home for me; the generation today is not into owning a physical piece of media. In the 70's, owning an LP was awesome (and necessary) because there was usually some effort put into the artwork. Today, no one wants to own a mass produced DVD/BluRay Disc with shitty artwork and no liner notes. Some CD's still come with good artwork, but the generation now values owning digital media.
- Unseelie 15y ago
  > the generation now values owning digital media I think you've missed the point, it isn't about ownership at all, or even that the media is digital. Its that what we value is access to the media. We're willing to pay a nominal fee for access to it, but that's really all we care about: Having the media play when we want it to. Ownership of the media is irrelevant to our experience of the media...unless not owning it means we cannot experience it.
  - Lewisham 15y ago
    Yes, this was what I was getting at. I don't want or need to have some physical object that tells me "this is my media". We've been through enough format changes to understand that "this is my media for ten years, then I'll need to convert it or buy it again." Access is the key, not ownership. That being said, I am deeply concerned about central media control allowing companies and governments to become revisionist; editing out controversial portions of various works as they see fit. I would like to see legislation that would prevent that.

d0ne 15y ago

Interesting to note that Google ( Youtube was known to loose money so I am not including it for the rest of this comment ) is no where to be found but FB is on all 3 list. FB isn't getting more $ per ad than Google ( probably less ) but their underlying technical cost to handle an individual users is apparently far greater.

ck2 15y ago

So since netflix is being the single best provider with virtually no "all you can eat" competitors and their userbase is ever growing - how long until a price increase? At 25 million subscribers, means for every $1 increase they will get another $300 Million a year. That's too tempting to resist, no?

ktsmith 15y ago
At $8/mo I have no problem with paying for Netflix for what I can get out of it right now. We get all of our sons content from Netflix and my wife can get some of the TV shows she liks from Netflix. I would probably pay up to $10/mo for what is currently available. However I would be really aware of every price increase due to the fact that 99.9% of what I want to watch is DVD only. It sounds crazy since $10/mo isn't really that much money, but anything over that and I'd probably cancel the service due to the poor selection of recent titles and the only "ok" quality of the video stream. edit: I should add that we are on the verge of cancelling Hulu due to the large number of device restrictions. We don't care much for the back catalog of shows or movies so there's no value in that. When we also can't stream a show to the TV and have to watch it on the PC that's a disincentive to use the product.
awj 15y ago
Except that the price is likely a factor in all three of the reason you've cited. There's no real competitors because Netflix does a great job off an already low price. They have the market and are serving it well. That's ridiculously difficult to break into. Their growing userbase is possibly as much a result of the price as it is the features, so upping that jeopardizes that position as well. You are right, though. In many companies that would be too tempting to resist. From what I've seen it looks like Netflix's CEO has loftier goals than even what they're doing now. I'd like to think he plans on focusing on having enough money to keep building the market for a bit longer before switching gears to caching in.

romey 15y ago

I wonder if this data will change anything about the argument for net neutrality? The big telecom companies were already complaining about companies like netflix, skype, google etc. making huge piles of money by driving lots traffic and pulling lots of bandwidth for users; I'm sure Comcast wouldn't mind being able to charge customers a premium for a "Comcast Netflix package" with faster movie loading times, etc.

Apocryphon 15y ago

List of products/services that show that crusading anti-piracy media publishing companies are full of it: Netflix, Steam, Hulu, O'Reilly Media, that one anime streaming service that was covered previously by Ars Technica... who else?

tobylane 15y ago

iPlayer is the British equal (not equivalent - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...) with no recent data, and they intend on expanding at the ISPs cost http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/11/18/bbc-system-to-name-and-shame-uk-isps-that-throttle-iplayer-broadband-traffic.html http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/11/18/bbc-system-to-na...

code_duck 15y ago

'Facebook' is something that can be compared to 'HTTP' or 'ssl'? That second chart is deplorable. Whomever created that needs to go to some sort of remedial school to study making sense.

alienfluid 15y ago

Thinking about this from a technical point of view, would it make sense for Netflix (or even ISPs) to put in content-aware routers than can cache frequently requested bits? Won't this help, to a certain extent, alleviate the congestion? Of course, the assumption here is that for a large enough population, you will have more than one person requesting the same content in a given time period.

Retric 15y ago
Netflix provides machines to Large ISP's to reduce congestion. I don't know the specifics, but I suspect both Netflix and the ISP save money by doing so.
etcet 15y ago
Netflix uses a variety of CDNs (Content Delivery Network). I think Level 3 is currently their primary provider and they used to use Akamai. I'd say there's a fat chance of seeing Comcast benevolently caching Netflix traffic.
dmuino 15y ago
As I mentioned elsewhere Netflix does use Level3, Akamai, and Limelight. So the traffic is mainly coming from CDNs. I'm not sure if by "content-aware routers" you mean something like Content Centric Networking: http://www.ccnx.org/ http://www.ccnx.org/ If that's the case it'd be up to the ISPs to push that technology to their infrastructure. Van Jacobson gave a very informative presentation at Netflix about it a couple of months ago. It seems you can watch a similar presentation he gave at Google on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8
squeed 15y ago
At least two of Netflix's three CDNs place servers or connections within the ISPs. Akamai has servers deployed within almost every ISP, and Limelight has peering connections to their datacenters. I'm not sure about Level3 (and they've been pretty tight-lipped given the Comcast brouhaha). Rather than caching on the router side, I believe most of the magic happens in the load-balancing side. The effect (to the end-user) is the same, though.

kahawe 15y ago

Over here in Euroland, we can only cry ourselves to sleep until they finally stream movies over here! Could we please ditch the pre-historic distribution and TV stations already and switch to a more demand-oriented paradigm?

JoeP 15y ago
I know it sounds like a pain in the ass, but I've got a somewhat stable solution. Invest in a good VPN with several US based end-points (I like StrongVPN myself) which by itself will allow you to watch normal Hulu. I personally then go a little further and use a US based mail forwarder (which I use for several other things, not just this) to sign up for Hulu+ and Netflix. It costs me about $20 per month, plus the standard cost of Hulu+ and Netflix obviously.
- OPAS 15y ago
  That's a great idea! Why is it costing you $20/month? You can get a US forwarding address with no monthly maintenance fee here: http://bit.ly/f4v9Je http://bit.ly/f4v9Je

mattraibert 15y ago

> most of the video to the home is cached on the edge of the network rather than going through the backbone. I'd like to know more about what this means exactly. Do they have complete copies of their streaming library all over the place so that everyone is downloading from a relatively local source?