nyalrho jarett ulbright
Cloris Sopha
I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. I tried to create as coherent a narrative as I could. If there are any errors I'd be more than happy to fix them. Keep in mind this article is not a technical deep dive. It's a big picture type article. For example, I don't mention the word microservice even once :-)
Given our discussion in the What is Cloud Computing? chapter, you might expect Netflix to serve video using AWS. Press play in a Netflix application and video stored in S3 would be streamed from S3, over the internet, directly to your device.
Another relevant factoid is Netflix is subscription based. Members pay Netflix monthly and can cancel at any time. When you press play to chill on Netflix, it had better work. Unhappy members unsubscribe.
The client is the user interface on any device used to browse and play Netflix videos. It could be an app on your iPhone, a website on your desktop computer, or even an app on your Smart TV. Netflix controls each and every client for each and every device.
Everything that happens before you hit play happens in the backend, which runs in AWS. That includes things like preparing all new incoming video and handling requests from all apps, websites, TVs, and other devices.
In 2007 Netflix introduced their streaming video-on-demand service that allowed subscribers to stream television series and films via the Netflix website on personal computers, or the Netflix software on a variety of supported platforms, including smartphones and tablets, digital media players, video game consoles, and smart TVs.
Netflix succeeded. Netflix certainly executed well, but they were late to the game, and that helped them. By 2007 the internet was fast enough and cheap enough to support streaming video services. That was never the case before. The addition of fast, low-cost mobile bandwidth and the introduction of powerful mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, has made it easier and cheaper for anyone to stream video at any time from anywhere. Timing is everything.
Building out a datacenter is a lot of work. Ordering equipment takes a long time. Installing and getting all the equipment working takes a long time. And as soon they got everything working they would run out of capacity, and the whole process had to start over again.
The long lead times for equipment forced Netflix to adopt what is known as a vertical scaling strategy. Netflix made big programs that ran on big computers. This approach is called building a monolith. One program did everything.
What Netflix was good at was delivering video to their members. Netflix would rather concentrate on getting better at delivering video rather than getting better at building datacenters. Building datacenters was not a competitive advantage for Netflix, delivering video is.
It took more than eight years for Netflix to complete the process of moving from their own datacenters to AWS. During that period Netflix grew its number of streaming customers eightfold. Netflix now runs on several hundred thousand EC2 instances.
The advantage of having three regions is that any one region can fail, and the other regions will step in handle all the members in the failed region. When a region fails, Netflix calls this evacuating a region.
The header image is meant to intrigue you, to draw you into selecting a video. The idea is the more compelling the header image, the more likely you are to watch a video. And the more videos you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe from Netflix.
The first thing Netflix does is spend a lot of time validating the video. It looks for digital artifacts, color changes, or missing frames that may have been caused by previous transcoding attempts or data transmission problems.
A pipeline is simply a series of steps data is put through to make it ready for use, much like an assembly line in a factory. More than 70 different pieces of software have a hand in creating every video.
The idea behind a CDN is simple: put video as close as possible to users by spreading computers throughout the world. When a user wants to watch a video, find the nearest computer with the video on it and stream to the device from there.
In 2007, when Netflix debuted its new streaming service, it had 36 million members in 50 countries, watching more than a billion hours of video each month, streaming multiple terabits of content per second.
At the same time, Netflix was also devoting a lot of effort into all the AWS services we talked about earlier. Netflix calls the services in AWS its control plane. Control plane is a telecommunications term identifying the part of the system that controls everything else. In your body, your brain is the control plane; it controls everything else.
In 2011, Netflix realized at its scale it needed a dedicated CDN solution to maximize network efficiency. Video distribution is a core competency for Netflix and could be a huge competitive advantage.
The number of OCAs on a site depends on how reliable Netflix wants the site to be, the amount of Netflix traffic (bandwidth) that is delivered from that site, and the percentage of traffic a site allows to be streamed.
Within a location, a popular video like House of Cards is copied to many different OCAs. The more popular a video, the more servers it will be copied to. Why? If there was only one copy of a very popular video, streaming the video to members would overwhelm the server. As they say, many hands make light work.
Right now, up to 100% of Netflix content is being served from within ISP networks. This reduces costs by relieving internet congestion for ISPs. At the same time, Netflix members experience a high-quality viewing experience. And network performance improves for everyone.
What may not be immediately obvious is that the OCAs are independent of each other. OCAs act as self-sufficient video-serving archipelagos. Members streaming from one OCA are not affected when other OCAs fail.
For Netflix viewers who have trouble browsing through the streaming service, developer Cyris finally brought a viable solution to the table: Netflix Super Browse, a browser extension that works on both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Netflix has a massive library that consists of thousands of TV shows and movies, where they are all categorized into thousands of micro-genres. Because of that setup, it would sometimes take ages to find new and appealing content.
A workaround method to unlock these so-called hidden genres has emerged, though. Subscribers can play with the end number of the Netflix URL (e.g., www.netflix.com/browse/genre/1234) and land on various sections of the streaming service to discover and find content. As everyone can imagine, that's not exactly the most efficient method.
Once the plugin is installed, all the viewer needs to do is head to the website version of Netflix and log into his or her account. On the main page, the Super Browse menu will be positioned beside the Netflix header.
Gone are the days of keying in assorted codes and changing them to get around Netflix like a caveman. But seriously, this convenient and simple tool is a big game changer. Of course, that doesn't discount the old method, but Netflix Super Browse will likely become the go-to approach to browse Netflix.
Netflix Super Browse rolled out on Jan. 11 and is available free of charge on Chrome and Firefox. However, take note that it is still in beta, so running into a couple of bugs here and there is safe to expect.
As for the reaction of Netflix, the company's spokesperson Marlee Tart tells Mashable via email that Netflix only uses the secret categories to generate recommendations for subscribers based on their viewing histories. In other words, the streaming company doesn't seem to be bothered by the extension at all.
Choosing a movie to watch at home can be incredibly difficult when you don't already have one in mind. But there's a shortcut for your iPhone that can make it easier to browse your streaming media services for something good to play. More specifically, it lets you browse Netflix and Amazon Prime at the same time.
Yes, there are tons of good categories to sift through in Netflix and Prime Video themselves, but when it comes to top flicks, you're limited by the user ratings on each service, which can vary substantially.
If you connect your paid subscriptions to Apple's TV app for iOS, you can find content from there, but it's not as easy to browse, and you never know if the title you tap on will actually be on Netflix or Prime Video.
The "Pick a Movie" shortcut from mralexhay makes it more convenient to browse Netflix and Prime Video at the same time by searching through genres, popularity, directors, actors, and ratings. And when it comes to ratings for the top films, using the Flickmetrix API, it combines the scores from Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Letterboxd, and Metacritic for an overall rating that you could find more useful.
While it's not as versatile as apps such as JustWatch, which don't use combined scores to order flicks but are hooked into more streaming services, it's great if you only have Netflix and Prime Video and would like one less app on your iPhone.
The Pick a Movie shortcut is not found in the "Gallery" tab of the Shortcuts app, but it is hosted on RoutineHub, a site dedicated to hosting user-created shortcuts. You can visit its RoutineHub page to check for updates, or you can use the link below to open it up in your Shortcuts app directly.
When it opens in the Shortcuts app, review the contents in the shortcut's workflow. Doing so is an excellent way to spot actions you may not trust before installing. We've checked out Pick a Movie pretty thoroughly, and it all looks good to us. After reviewing, at the very bottom of the modal window, tap "Add Untrusted Shortcut."
Tap on the new shortcut from your "Gallery" tab in the Shortcuts app to run it for the first time. When you do, a prompt will ask you to let it access your iCloud Drive. It needs it to store its associated JSON file (which remembers your preferences) in your "Shortcuts" folder, so tap on "OK" to allow it.
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