I work for a media streaming site (rank <30k on alexa) and I assure you the architecture doesn't change much when you scale it up to rank 99 (netflix). "Trivia

I work for a media streaming site (rank <30k on alexa) and I assure you the architecture doesn't change much when you scale it up to rank 99 (netflix). "Trivial" may sound harsh but in terms of large scale systems it really doesn't get much simpler than serving static files. Obviously their auxiliary services (billing, content ingestion, social etc.) are nowhere near trivial. But there's no reason for the core services that are required to get the catalog and video to most[1] devices to not be damn near 100% available. I'm not talking down netflix for having an outage anyway. Shit happens and afaik their overall track record is not bad at all. I only replied to jrockway's claim that multi-datacenter redundancy would require inconceivable engineering effort or amounts of money - neither is true. [1] Excluding those that need realtime transcoding, absurd DRM schemes or similar.