janevit denzille nathanyel
Roxanna Bornemann
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.
In today's digital age, streaming services like Netflix have revolutionized the way we consume entertainment, offering a vast library of movies, TV shows, and documentaries at our fingertips. However, figuring out how to get Netflix on TV can sometimes seem challenging. While watching Netflix on a laptop or smartphone is convenient, nothing beats the experience of enjoying your favorite content on the larger screen of your TV. This guide provides you with a step-by-step process to connect Netflix to your TV using various devices you might already have at home, including Smart TVs, gaming consoles, streaming sticks like Chromecast, Roku, and Amazon Fire Stick, and even your regular computer.
Netflix has become the go-to source for streaming TV shows and movies, but how do you get it on your TV? We'll show you how to connect Netflix to a TV so that you can watch all of your favorite content from the comfort of your living room.
The Netflix app can be found on the home screen or main menu of smart TVs that support Netflix. Try searching for Netflix in the app store on your TV to see if it's there. Then do the following steps:
Chromecast is a compact streaming device. It is connected to your TV's HDMI connection with a cable that is included. Your TV's HDMI ports are often numbered. Keep track of the number of HDMI ports you are using.
Now that you know how to connect Netflix to TV, you can enjoy watching your favorite shows and movies in high definition. We hope this guide has provided you with the information needed to successfully connect Netflix to your TV! If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to contact us!
I have not been able to get Netflix video to work in Safari on my iMac but Netflix works fine on Safari on my MacBook. I am running an iMac (macOS Sierra 10.12.3) and Safari (10.0.3) on both computers.
Having to use Chrome to watch Netflix on my Mac has been vexing me for sometime. I forget which Mac update broke Netflix but Walter-Kiri solution worked for me. Simple but it solved the problem. Thank you.
Try setting up another admin user account to see if the same problem continues. If Back-to-My Mac is selected in System Preferences, the Guest account will not work. The intent is to see if it is specific to one account or a system wide problem. This account can be deleted later.
I have opened the primary mac user account in Safe Mode and it still does not play. I tried a secondary mac user account and the Netflix played. So, back in the primary account, I disabled all the start-up and running apps but Netflix still did not play in Safari. So, it must be something to do with the user account but I cannot figure out what app is the conflict considering I have disabled every other app I use.
Today, i needed to boot into safe-mode. I thought, for the heck of it, I would try to run Netflix on Safari in safe-mode. It immediately showed that I needed to install Silver-light of which I knew I had already done so I thought "this isn't going to help" and continued to reboot my computer in regular boot up.
As soon as I launched Safari, since Netflix was the last page that I was on, Netflix came up, of course, but this time, it popped up a message asking me to TRUST SILVER-LIGHT. I clicked TRUST and it immediately started working. I can now watch Netflix on Safari.
I called Netflix and they immediately said that they are having outages on Safari. I told the girl that answered about my experience and asked her if she would let the engineers know and maybe they can start using that to see if it will help others. She said she was shooting it up to the engineers. I'm kind of doubting it being her response was so quick and she didn't seem to be listening in the first place. I wanted to put her on the spot and ask her what she was going to "shoot up to the engineers", but I decided not to. If this helps, please let me know.
booted into safe-mode by shutting down the computer, holding the left shift key and turning on the computer while not letting go of the shift key. (If you are successfully in safe-mode, it will seem like your computer is glitchy as the screen will refresh or flash everytime you do something and trying to watch Netflix show - getting the "Need to Install Silver-Light" message. Shut down computer. Unplugged the power for 1 minute (Its important to actually unplug the power from the computer, not just turn off a power switch or other power supply - MUST unplug power cord from computer)
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