Some quick figures to put it in perspective: According to instantwatcher.com, there are 6843 movies on Netflix streaming currently. If we conservatively say th

Some quick figures to put it in perspective: According to instantwatcher.com, there are 6843 movies on Netflix streaming currently. If we conservatively say that the 1080p stream is 2gb, and the other formats add up to another 2gb, that's a total of ~27 TB of space required. There are 3657 seasons of TV, let's say an average of 2gb per episode, and an average of 14 episodes a season. That's ~102 TB. So napkin math suggests ~129TB of storage to hold all of Netflix, or 33 of these drives. Since they need redundancy and to have servers distributed around the country for peering, and these drives will probably cost ~$10k each (5x premium on consumer), I doubt they'll be putting their long tail content on them. How many people in Boston are currently watching Mission Impossible, the TV series from 1966? Or content like it? A standard hard drive can serve 500 people HD streams so long as you cache ahead into memory intelligently in big enough chunks. Within a few generations, SSDs will probably be cheap enough to not even bother with mechanical, for this and many other use cases. [1]http://instantwatcher.com/titles/all?tv_filter=movies+only http://instantwatcher.com/titles/all?tv_filter=movies+only