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I really think Netflix could make some good money being a multimedia-cdn (even for "competitors")

by nix23 4y ago

coldpie 4y ago
Wow, that is actually a really interesting idea in the context of developing a YouTube competitor. Delivery & bandwidth are a really high barrier to entry, and piggy-backing off of Netflix's existing network could really lower those costs. I agree the "providing services to your direct competition" is probably a stumbling block, and likely Netflix has other irons in the fire. But anyway it's a cool idea to think about.
virtuallynathan 4y ago
It works with such high efficiency because we know how to place content in advance, and the catalog is relatively small. Trying to serve 800Gbps of YouTube content would be a nightmare.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I wonder how much of YT traffic is the "big" (say >200k viewers in a month) vs the small guys. But yeah, once your hot data size exceeds cache byebye efficiency
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    One hard part is that on the youtube side, most views occur within the first 48 hours or so and a good fraction occur within the first 6. With netflix, they have a catalogue of ~5000 videos and gets <200 new per month. Youtube has around 30k channels with more than 500k subscriptions, so that's somewhere around 30k videos per week.
- nix23 4y ago
  I don't talk directly about Youtube, but also serving Disney, hula, but ESPECIALLY national/continental portals like Arte.tv, Play-SRF, ARD-Mediathek etc.
- drewg123 4y ago
  Indeed. YT has a much different problem, which is to determine which video is going to go viral, and then transcode it into popular formats when it does. In comparison, we pre-transcode everything to exacting standards, so all our CDN has to do is serve is static files.
jedberg 4y ago
I thought the same thing 10 years ago when I worked there. At the time management was not interested in losing focus on doing anything other than streaming movies to customers. But it should be noted that the FreeBSD Openconnect boxes are highly optimized to Netflix's use case. Which is serving a predefined set of content that has been pre-rendered. Youtube and its ilk are a completely different use case. The Netflix cache is so optimized for serving Netflix movies that for many years we still used Akamai for all of our other CDN needs, but it looks like they may have finally moved that to Netflix's own CDN now.

I really think Netflix could make some good money being a multimedia-cdn (even for "competitors")

by nix23 4y ago

I really think Netflix could make some good money being a multimedia-cdn (even for "competitors")

Wow, that is actually a really interesting idea in the context of developing a YouTube competitor. Delivery & bandwidth are a really high barrier to entry, and piggy-backing off of Netflix's existing network could really lower those costs. I agree the "providing services to your direct competition" is probably a stumbling block, and likely Netflix has other irons in the fire. But anyway it's a cool idea to think about.

virtuallynathan 4y ago

It works with such high efficiency because we know how to place content in advance, and the catalog is relatively small. Trying to serve 800Gbps of YouTube content would be a nightmare.

ilyt 4y ago
I wonder how much of YT traffic is the "big" (say >200k viewers in a month) vs the small guys. But yeah, once your hot data size exceeds cache byebye efficiency
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  One hard part is that on the youtube side, most views occur within the first 48 hours or so and a good fraction occur within the first 6. With netflix, they have a catalogue of ~5000 videos and gets <200 new per month. Youtube has around 30k channels with more than 500k subscriptions, so that's somewhere around 30k videos per week.
nix23 4y ago
I don't talk directly about Youtube, but also serving Disney, hula, but ESPECIALLY national/continental portals like Arte.tv, Play-SRF, ARD-Mediathek etc.
drewg123 4y ago
Indeed. YT has a much different problem, which is to determine which video is going to go viral, and then transcode it into popular formats when it does. In comparison, we pre-transcode everything to exacting standards, so all our CDN has to do is serve is static files.

jedberg 4y ago

I thought the same thing 10 years ago when I worked there. At the time management was not interested in losing focus on doing anything other than streaming movies to customers. But it should be noted that the FreeBSD Openconnect boxes are highly optimized to Netflix's use case. Which is serving a predefined set of content that has been pre-rendered. Youtube and its ilk are a completely different use case. The Netflix cache is so optimized for serving Netflix movies that for many years we still used Akamai for all of our other CDN needs, but it looks like they may have finally moved that to Netflix's own CDN now.