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Rosita Westhouse
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.
Original Camera and Audio files must be stored securely, safely, reliably, and be accessible throughout Production and Post Production. These requirements can be met by implementing data management strategies such as the industry-wide known 3:2:1 strategy.
Each title is responsible for ensuring good data management strategies are maintained through final delivery to Netflix. If you have questions or concerns about the media management plan on your title, reach out to your Netflix representatives.
Netflix Footage Ingest is not in itself a data management strategy, but it is a solution that can simplify and expedite your data management plan. Netflix considers 3:2:1 completely fulfilled by the completion of the backup and verification of OCF/OPA to Netflix Cloud Storage via Netflix Footage Ingest.
When uploading OCF / OPA to Netflix Content Hub, files are fully verified first in Netflix Data Center Storage and then in Netflix Cloud Storage. Each step of the process is clearly communicated through email notifications back to Production and visibility in the Content Hub interface.
Once Production has confirmed all OCF and OPA are fully verified in Netflix Cloud Storage, Netflix does not require Production to retain additional copies of the source media. In most cases, Footage Ingest will replace Netflix studio requirements for LTOs or hard drives, unless directed differently by Netflix and/or its Production Partner. If you have questions or concerns about the media management plan on your title, reach out to your Netflix representatives.
After the original checksum-verified copy with machine-readable checksum manifests (e.g., ASC MHL) has been completed, any subsequent copies should be validated against the checksum values from the original copy to ensure the chain of custody. This validation ensures nothing has changed in those directories and files.
Hold enough cards to complete the expectations above. This usually means having enough cards for two days of shooting; however, always have the 3:2:1 conversation with all stakeholders before confirming that you have enough camera cards.
Editorial is uniquely positioned to catch other discrepancies not noticed during offload review or Full QC in a controlled environment. This is because Editorial has access to reports from multiple departments such as Script Supervisor, Camera, Sound, and Dailies Vendor, as well as visual proxies with additional metadata. They can cross-reference all of these to confirm receipt of every piece of shot material and potentially flag image inconsistencies or possible problems when reviewing.
So now, instead of handing over a mixtape to impress a friend, we share a Spotify playlist. And instead of recording a favorite movie or a Christmas special onto a blank VHS tape when it airs and replaying it whenever the mood strikes, we just open a Netflix app and stream whatever suits our mood.
There are dozens of streaming media businesses but they generally all have some clause in them that says the same thing these ones do: recording our content in any way is a big no-no and will get you booted off our service. Period.
The key finding from that SCOTUS ruling is that recording and time-shifted viewing of copyrighted broadcasts for your own, personal, non-commercial use is not copyright infringement, but instead qualifies as fair use.
The Court also ruled that the maker of a VCR could not be held liable for any infringing behavior an end user committed, which is what allowed VCR manufacturers to proliferate even though video pirates used them to create bootleg recordings.
Ratings giant Nielsen has long since had to take the +3 and +7 (three days and seven days after broadcast, respectively) ratings into account for its customers, because tens of millions of us are consuming programming at the times of our choosing, instead of when a network decides for it to air.
PlayOn, Lawrence explained, explicitly does not circumvent any DRM, nor does it access the encrypted stream in any way to download material. Instead, it functions essentially as a browser-based screen-capture program. The consumer has to queue up and play something in order for PlayOn to record it, which PlayOn then does in real-time invisibly in a background process.
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