Netflix's corporate newsroom and company blog, covering its streaming infrastructure, cloud migration, content deals and product features.
HN commenters link it mainly for the post on how Netflix works with ISPs and its Open Connect caching appliances that deliver most video traffic.
> Imagine you could send an audio or video stream to potentially everyone with internet access in the whole world but would need to pay only for the bandwidth of exactly one stream. That would be very nice for you, or Spotify, or Netflix, but not such a good deal as the current one for your ISP.
This mostly happens with Akamai [1] and Netflix [2] CDN appliances on edge networks though (content caching boxes used to offload transit or peering fabric traffic). I'd argue Multicast didn't take off because of "tragedy of the commons" issues; ISPs don't want to support additional complex network routing technologies (at additional, substantial cost) when existing one to many unicast solutions (mentioned above) are sufficient.
[1] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/akamai/akamai-accelerated-network-partner-aanp-faq.pdf
[2] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-around-the-globe-to-deliver-a-great-viewing-experience
>>Then [Netflix] went ahead and worked with T-Mobile on Binge-On where they would throttle speeds and cap the resolution to 480p on their network which was also a troubling sign.
A year ago almost to the day, Netflix admitted[1] that they (not carriers) were pre-emptively lowering the resolution of Verizon and AT&T subscriber streams. The irony last year was that neither AT&T nor Verizon were aware of this until T-Mobile's CEO called them out on it[2].
At the time, I seem to recall this didn't impinge much on the consciousness of Net Neutrality supporters as it should have.
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/helping-netflix-members-get-more-from-their-mobile-data-plans
[2] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11302446/netflix-admits-throttling-video-att-verizon-customers
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/netflix-is-not-really-all-in-on-amazon-s-cloud.html
And,
> We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.
Source: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud-migration
Netflix still operates its own data centers and CDN to deliver video. This is not done on AWS.
> I already use Netflix for my video streaming.
To be fair, though, if AWS were to disappear your Netflix wouldn't work anymore. And given that it took them seven years [1] to move to AWS, I guess it would take them quite a while to move to Azure or Google or their own hardware.
For the logistics / shopping part I agree, though: I live in Switzerland, where Amazon doesn't ship much except for books and I have to say I don't feel I'm missing much. In fact, many local online stores which could develop because they weren't drowned by Amazon work better IMHO and at similar prices than the Amazon website.
[1]: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud-migration
I get what you're saying about the benefits of PaaS or other managed services, but Netflix serves most content (by volume) off of appliances [1] they ship to ISPs that feed into the network at points-of-presence somewhere close to an edge. They use AWS for logic and compute (including transcoding [3]), but video streams from this globally-distributed CDN [2].
[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ [2] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-around-the-globe-to-deliver-a-great-viewing-experience [3] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/high-quality-video-encoding-at-scale-d159db052746
Netflix's announcement: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/evolving-proxy-detection-as-a-global-service
> Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.