dejmati latyshah carmah
Arabella Kochanski
A nice benefit of subtitles and closed captions on Hulu is that you can choose English or Spanish, when available, format captions, and each profile can manage captions independently. They can also be turned on and off based on the content being watched.
Cox Contour TV is a cable service from Cox Enterprises. Cox also offers a streaming device that works with any TV and provides access to Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+ and other streaming services.
A streaming device, aka streaming media player, is a physical piece of hardware. It connects to your TV through the HDMI port and uses your internet connection to stream online content to your TV, making it possible to access all your favorite services in one location.
You can turn captions for Roku on or off for the device itself or within individual channels that you download. Note that the availability of captions through Roku depends on the service provider offering them.
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 cannot turn off subtitles (closed captioning) for one of my three chromecast devices that are used to support my usage of YouTube TV and other apps such as Netflix on my TV. The subtitles are showing up regardless of which app is in use. I've tried everything in settings for both the apps and for the TVs themselves. I even bought a new TV, believing it was a fault of the TV. But, surprisingly, even the new TV continued to display the closed captioning. So next, I switched the chromecast devices between TVs. Lo and behold, the unwanted closed captioning followed the switched (faulty) chromecast device! So, it's clearly the one single chromecast device that is causing the closed captioning. There is no resolution I've found on any help sessions, searches, etc. I've seen other posts where a person has been frustrated in not getting resolution, but I've now done sufficient experimentation to isolate the only remaining possible issue. It is not a TV nor app setting as I've verified I can watch TV without closed captioning on any two of my three TVs that are not using the (faulty) chromecast device without changing any other settings. I now believe it is a faulty chromecast device itself, but am willing to hear if there is some other resolution or means to fix my faulty chromecast device. If true, how do I get a replacement?
I finally resolved my problem myself. For anyone having issues with closed captioning being mysteriously turned on, understand there are closed caption settings that can be initialized for many layers of your viewing experience. I've fiddled with them at the TV-level, for Google TV at a general level, and for individual apps. I finally discovered a closed caption setting at the YouTube TV app level that was just a down-arrow search and selection for closed captioning. It was simple to re-set, but if you get frustrated by all the other options you have for turning on/off closed captioning, just relax and keep trying other options.
This is additional clarification of the original issue posted above. I miss-stated that subtitles are showing up with every app when using the (faulty) chromecast device. This is not correct. For both Netflix and Amazon Prime, I can successfully turn off subtitles. It is only when using YouTube TV that I experience the subtitles, and cannot turn them off using the YouTube settings when using the (faulty) chromecast device. I have repeatedly turned on/off the closed captioning setting for the YouTube app, but this has no impact on the presence of the closed captioning. Again, this is only the case for one (faulty) chromecast device that I've now switched/used on three different TVs. When using my other chromecast devices, I do not get the closed captioning. Furthermore, changing and/or turning off the closed captioning settings for the TV itself has no impact on the closed captioning, and its display font/color, when using the (faulty) chromecast device.
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