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Marthe Bernskoetter
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.
I use the Netflix app on all my devices. I have my Netflix logged into my TV which is connected to the WiFi at one of my houses and whenever I try to watch Netflix on any device at my other home using the WiFi there, it just does the same thing as you are facing. Following up with support, I got told its due to the new No-password sharing policy being implemented in small scale which should gradually roll out to everyone. Also, the support is not the best, at the early part of my tickets, they would just ask me to check by rebooting the device, re - installing Netflix app or some dumb crap, then after a lot of back & forth, they game me the above answer of No Pass Sharing
I have the Basic Netflix account through my Volt package. Initially this was working as expected, I could watch Netflix in 2 devices simultaneously, until recently it stopped working. I can watch Netflix on 2 of my Virgin boxes but when I try to watch on an iPad, 3rd Netflix box, phone etc, I get a message that my payment details need to be updated.
Hi Dave I have three Virgin boxes l, NF works on 2 of them and no other devices, last week I received a notification last week from NF that my account is now suspended due to non payment, gone from bad to worse.
This week, I've encountered strange behavior on two different Roku TVs in two different states. In both cases, while watching a show the app would suddenly stop and go back to the home screen. When resuming the show, it often would start playing a minute or two earlier in the episode than where it stopped. Also, the issue happens repeatedly, even after restarting the device. I've tested it on different internet sources, and that didn't make a difference.
Before I go the route of reinstalling apps or factory resetting, is anyone else experiencing something similar? This started about a week ago. It seems unlikely reseting will fix this gs as this is happening on more than one device in different locations.
I'm having the exact same issue but only on 1, my newest TV, a Roku TCL, 58 inch. Starts the episode on Netflix and with no warning stops and goes to the home page. i've tried everything from uninstalling to reinstalling the apps. Annoying to say the least.
There are a few possible reasons why your Prime and Netflix apps are crashing on your Roku TVs. Here are some troubleshooting steps you can try before resorting to reinstalling apps or factory resetting:
Help, this problem just started for me in the last 24 hours on every TCL Roku Series 4, 5, 6 I own. Only Netflix and Prime crash, all other apps are fine. Tried restart, reinstall, no luck. Cannot figure out how to clear app cash, none of the TVs have Settings > System > Advanced system settings > App > Netflix/Prime Video > Clear cash option. Thanks.
Did you restart your Roku device before re-installing the channel? That step is crucial when performing the troubleshooting. If you haven't tried the suggested order (remove > restart > re-install), we would recommend giving it a shot once again. We also suggest doing the restart from the Settings menu by navigating to Settings > System > Power (If you do not see a Power submenu, skip to the next step.) > System restart.
For detailed instructions, refer to this Support link: How do I resolve channel playback issues?"
Does the issue occur on the Netflix channel only or all channels on your Roku devices? What are the steps to reproduce the issue you are seeing? What troubleshooting steps have you already taken to try to resolve the issue?
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