Dan Rayburn writes about CDNs, video streaming, and the business deals and pricing behind online video delivery.
HN commenters cite it as a source for which CDNs big companies use, such as Amazon with Fastly, Apple's iCloud Private Relay, and CDN pricing.
It isn't Apple, it's Netflix.
Remember back in 2014 or so when Netflix users on Comcast were getting slow connections and buffering pauses? It didn't affect people who watched Netflix via Apple TV because Netflix served Apple TV users with a different network.
> In a little known, but public fact, anyone who is on Comcast and using Apple TV to stream Netflix wasn’t having quality problems. The reason for this is that Netflix is using Level 3 and Limelight to stream their content specifically to the Apple TV device. What this shows is that Netflix is the one that decides and controls how they get their content to each device and whether they do it via their own servers or a third party. Netflix decides which third party CDNs to use and when Netflix uses their own CDN, they decide whom to buy transit from, with what capacity, in what locations and how many connections they buy, from the transit provider. Netflix is the one in control of this, not Comcast or any ISP.
https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2014/02/heres-comcast-netflix-deal-structured-numbers.html
They used to use AWS CloudFront and switched to Fastly, someone shared this in another comment:
[https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-homepage.html](title: CDN Fastly Wins Content Delivery Business For Amazon.com and IMDB Websites)
Quoting:
> "But with small object delivery, like images loading fast on Amazon’s home page, it’s the opposite. Customers will pay for a better level of performance and in this case, Fastly clearly outperformed Amazon’s own CDN CloudFront. This isn’t too surprising since CloudFront’s strength isn’t web performance, or even live streaming, but rather on-demand delivery of video and downloads."
Bandwidth has become super cheap nowadays. Even on a CDN if you have a large enough commit the prices go very low, so you can imagine what the real cost must be:
> In Q1 of this year, I completed my yearly CDN pricing survey of over 500 customers and saw the lowest pricing rates I have ever seen for the largest customers, as low as $0.00038 per GB delivered in the US. Blended pricing globally at $0.0006. (Please note, this doesn’t mean these are the prices you should be asking for or paying!) Lower pricing is okay if traffic and commits are growing, but they aren’t
https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2024/05/cdn-pricing-pressure.html
Two points:
1. In 2014 Netflix made similar deals with AT&T and Verizon.
2. It is not extortion by the ISP, "pay up or else". But Netflix was simply building up its own CDN-capabilities. They ditched Akamai and Limelight and for that they needed their own server endpoints into the networks.
https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2014/02/heres-comcast-netflix-deal-structured-numbers.html
Cloudfront, by Amazon's own admission, specialises in high bandwidth delivery (ie huge videos). Fastly has consistently better performance as a small object cache, which makes it the choice for web assets
https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-homepage.html
Are you certain? As of last year, Amazon was switching to Fastly for their retain images:
https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-homepage.html