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Karri Weston
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.
A streaming media service (also simply called a streaming service) is an online platform that allows users to watch or listen to content, such as movies, TV shows, music, or podcasts, over the internet. Instead of downloading the content to their device, users can stream it in real-time, which means they can start watching or listening immediately without having to wait for the entire file to download. Popular examples of streaming services include Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube.
An over-the-top media service (OTT) is a streaming media service offered directly to viewers via the Internet. OTT bypasses cable, broadcast, and satellite television platforms, the companies that traditionally act as controllers or distributors of such content. Most of these services are owned by a major film studio. Some streaming services started as an add-on to Blu-ray offerings, which are supplements to the programs watched.
Digital streaming acts in a similar way to on-demand television in that the program to watch is selected. But the program is not recorded or stored like it might be on TiVo, etc. Digital video purchases grant a user indefinite access to a show or film, but the terms and conditions vary as to whether the file can be downloaded or must be streamed.
A client end-user can use a media player, computer, smartphone, or smart TV to start and continue playing digital video content before the entire file has been transmitted. Users will need an Internet connection to stream or download video content. Users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream or download certain content.
Hulu: Hulu Originals,[g] 20th Television, FX Networks, 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Blue Sky Studios, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, licensed content from other vendors
Max: HBO, Max Originals, Cinemax, Warner Bros.,[m] The CW, Discovery Channel, Food Network, TLC, Asian Food Network, Eurosport, HGTV, ID, Travel Channel, Animal Planet, Magnolia Network, New Line Cinema, DC Studios, Turner Entertainment, Warner Bros. Discovery Sports, CNN, HLN, BBC Studios, Sesame Workshop,[n] Comedy Central,[o] Studio Ghibli,[o] Cartoon Network, Cartoonito, Boomerang, Adult Swim, TBS, TNT, TruTV, Wizarding World
The following services are owned and operated by television networks, cable channels, or other conglomerates in that market. They are major content producers, and their streaming services serve as the primary means of distributing the content that often first airs on their networks or channels.
Multiple streamers can co-exist at once and the average SVOD subscriber now pays for 4.2 services, according to a JPMorgan survey. This is especially true as they all attempt to provide what consumers value most about the pay-TV bundle: a collection of sports, news, scripted and unscripted programming in one central location for one price (more on this later). But most important is the reality that these companies are all deploying various strategies to reach a variety of different goals.
The streaming wars are not defined by total library size, otherwise well-stocked FAST services such as Tubi and The Roku Channel would be winning. Netflix has the largest US SVOD library by far. But raw scale is no replacement for quality of content and the ability to elicit meaningful audience demand. Without it, large libraries can be like empty calories on a diet.
While Netflix has deliberately established itself as a one-stop-shop for all audience preferences, the sheer size of its library has led to the lowest average demand per title (both movie and show) among the major players at 2.23x as of October. The looming combination of Disney+ (5.62x average title demand) and Hulu (3.94x) boasts both the second largest library by total titles and a significantly better outlook from an average title demand perspective.
As mentioned above, one of the core attraction points of pay TV was its collections of live news and sports along with scripted and unscripted movies and TV shows. Streaming has yet to figure out news in a meaningful and consistent way while live sports access is almost single-handedly keeping linear TV alive at the moment.
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