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Lorin Searing
i had two long chats with Netflix help and they basically said my account / email is frozen with Apple for up to 65 days? So no netflix unless a) create a new account (lose history) or b) just wait 2 months? There must be a simple way to simply allow my account to be free again?
Yay. I can now say, a day and a half later, my email / account was released - officially Cancelling my Netflix account. This releasing of the account allowed me to resubscribe using my alternative billing option other than iTunes. Thank you! All is back to normal. Now for covid....
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.
The streaming industry is a behemoth. Currently sitting at $500+ billion in market size, it is expected to rise above $1 trillion in the next five years. Netflix is one of the largest streaming services, owning 44% of the market in the U.S. and Canada, with 75.57 million subscribers between those two countries. Over 238 million Netflix users across 190 countries can enjoy 13,500+ titles on demand worldwide. Or can they? Due to licensing rights, not all 13,500+ titles are available in every country. Since catalogs differ between regions, the question remains: which one is best? We used the unofficial Netflix online global search (aka uNoGS) to evaluate Netflix by country and award superlatives to the best of what the service offers worldwide.
Germany may not hold the top spot in these categories, but they deserve a special mention. When looking at titles that exceeded a rating of eight on IMDb, Germany was near the top with 582 in their sizable catalog of 7315. Germany had the second-highest number of IMDb top 250 titles, with 87 combined films and TV series. At a median price of $8.47 per month, Germany also came within a five-title deficit of every other winner on this list and came in second for the most new titles. Germany could be considered the overall winner of this Netflix by Country bracket for being runner-up in almost every category at a reasonable monthly price.
Selection is essential, and sadly, Israel has the smallest one. We would like to tell you they make up for it in ratings and new titles, but they fared median results compared to other countries. To add insult to injury, Israel also had the highest cost-per-title. This is likely due to its small catalog, but with little else to make up for it, Israelites are not getting a lot for paying an above-median price of $9.04 per month.
We honestly expected more from the U.K., an English-speaking country heavily intertwined with Hollywood. But Romania and the U.K. offer just two Oscar-winning titles in their catalog. Romanians pay one of the lowest prices of $5.29 per month for one of the most extensive catalogs (7748 titles) with some of the worst ratings. However, the U.K. also has a vast catalog of 7482 titles, with above-median results in a few categories. So, each country has its benefits and drawbacks.
One of the best ways to combat bandwidth throttling is by using a virtual private network, or VPN. It works by encrypting and tunneling your internet traffic through a remote server, making it nearly impossible for third parties to link your activity back to you. IPVanish offers VPN apps for all major streaming devices, such as Apple TV, Fire TV, and NVIDIA SHIELD, with intuitive features like Optimal Location and Favorites to get you streaming faster and better!
It likely has to do with either the region where the VPN's server is located, or those services are detecting the VPN's server(s) being used and deliberately disabling content (as VPNs are often used for connecting to such services from a different region to access different content).
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