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Trinidad Baltzell
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 regards to the BBC iPlayer - Sony is aware of various models of TVs that have this 'system memory limit' error message. At the moment there is no fix for this (if ever). It appears that the BBC keep making changes to the iPlayer app (or back-end systems) and its breaking the app on the TV.
In regards to Netflix - I have not heard of any reports for your TV (I think) - are you getting any error messages? Another avenue is to contact Netflix themselves (email or live chat) to see if they have had any reports on their side - they would be in a better position to know - its their app after all
Hi
I tried this but it had no effect. I have no idea why you think that changing the DNS server would have any effect at all.
I did receive this fro Sony
"With regards to your enquiry, We can confirm that Sony and BBC Iplayer are working on finding a solution for this issue. Unfortunately we do not have a date on when a solution will be available. For now, the work around mentioned in our previous email can be used.
With regards to Netflix crashing, please note that Sony is aware of this issue and is also working with Netflix to find a solution regarding this. Unfortunately we do not have a solution yet and cannot confirm a date either. "
The work around they mentioned for the I-player does not work, which I had mentioned to them However they seem to fail to understand the gulf between "being helpful" and "trying to be helpful". I am sure you can understand this
Jonathan
I have a 32GB iPad and all I want to use it for is watching Netflix, however it says 31.4 GB of storage is used up even though it has nothing on it (I just set it up from scratch again) - this prevents me from watching Netflix. How can I solve this problem?? Other system data is 25.09GB...
Minus 2-4 GBs, for iOS/iPadOS system operational reserve, that MUST BE MAINTAINED AT ALL TIMES, to ensure/insure normal, expected operation of iOS/iPad OS, leaves approx. between 20-21GBs of actual, usable data storage space.
"Other" includes system files, caches, Siri voices, logs and updates - it is a common problem for this to be high, but it can often reach unreasonable levels which I presume has been the case for you and this shows some form of memory/storage corruption on your device.
Firstly, please make sure your phone is running the latest version of iOS. You can check this by going into Settings > General > Software Update. if your phone isn't updated you should update it first because "Other" can sometimes include system updates which can be very large, and it is always recommended to have the latest version of iOS to avoid bugs and get the latest new features and security enhancements so even if this doesn't fix your issue (if you have an update downloaded but not installed it likely will) it is still worth doing.
If you really don't want to go down that route you could try Changing Messages Settings so your messages delete sooner, by default it is set to keeping forever. Deleting your browsing data and closing down tabs on Safari also helps. If I can be of any further assistance please let me know.
I use Microsoft Edge purely to stream Disney+. That is the only tab I have open. After streaming for a while, the browser crashes with the Error Code: Out Of Memory. I have to refresh to go back to what I was doing. But after a while, it happens again. It's been happening for a while now. And I know it is Browser Guard because when I disabled it and used Edge for a couple more days, I didn't get the crash and error again. I only have one tab open, the Disney+ video player, and Browser Guard is the only extension installed. Browser Guard version 2.4.0, Edge Version 100.0.1185.50 (Official build) (64-bit).
Could you please send a Browser Guard debug log which shows the error as it occurs? Also, because I am plagued by an unfixed Microsoft bug which causes severe memory issues, could you do an easy test while you are streaming? Trying to narrow the list. Here is what you would need to do...
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