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"

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