elmethor tevyss carsin
Margit Szermer
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.
Question: What's the last brand to which you replied on social media? (By this I don't mean the last brand you complained to on Twitter in hopes of getting a refund - but rather the last time you commented on a brand's Instagram post or saw a brand tweet and replied to/quote tweeted it)
I went through my own tweets and - I swear I didn't plan this - the last brand I replied to was Netflix. In fact, I sent one of the 9,600 replies/mentions that Netflix received on Nov 11th alone. Sure, half of the mentions that Netflix gets is about renewing "Anne with an E" (please note that this is the first time anyone has actually cared about Canadian history), but the other half is because Netflix has a brand voice worth replying to.
For social media managers, it's almost intuitive why having a good brand voice matters for your brand's social channels: it can help drive engagement, attract new followers, and make your audience pay more attention to everything you post, including brand & promotional messages. What's less intuitive is exactly how to craft a good brand voice. It's not as simple as being sassy and posting memes - it's about knowing your audience first, developing a human voice that reflects your brand, and being consistent with it over time. So, how has Netflix crafted an amazing brand voice?
Ultimately, your brand voice isn't about your brand, it's about who your brand is talking to. The biggest trap to avoid is forming it based on your own personality or your own opinion of what it should sound like. Remember, you are not your customer (regardless of how much you relate to the product or fall within the target market).
Netflix has done a great job of recognizing who they're talking to and crafting a voice that resonates with that audience. Their target audience is less about demographics, and more about frame of mind - after all, they have a global audience that spans all ages, locations, languages, and so on. But, that audience shares the same characteristics when they're watching TV: they're relaxed, not in a serious mood, and looking to be entertained. The tone of their brand voice reflects that: it's informal, conversational, and humourous. With each post, Netflix knows they're talking to stans, existing customers, or pop culture aficionados who just want to be in-the-know, and as such, their tone varies from post to post.
Admittedly, Netflix has a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to knowing their audience: they have crazy amounts of data about their subscribers, including demographics and watch habits. They know exactly who uses their product, their interests, their age range, where they're located, what languages they speak. And based upon viewing trends, they can design memes to go viral by posting them just as everyone is starting to watch the newest show or movie.
But, that doesn't mean other brands can't replicate Netflix's success if they don't have access to the same amount of customer data. Use your existing followers as a starting point - go into Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics to get basic demographic data. Even better would be researching your customers, be it through surveys, external market research, or customer interviews. In most companies this already happens outside of the social media team, so all you need to do is reach out to your customer success or sales team to see what customer data you can use to build your brand voice.
? Key takeaway: Before creating your brand voice, research your brand's target market on social media. Which (brand) accounts do they follow? How do those accounts write/sound? How do they interact with these accounts? Take cues from these accounts to build the foundation for your own brand voice. Your voice should also reflect the demographics and interests of your audience - brands that want to appeal to Gen Z should sound very different than brands targeting Millennials/Boomers or other groups.
90f70e40cf