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Amit Bolds
I get Netflix as part of my Comcast package. So how do I watch Netflix on my computer or cellphone? I don't find a way through the Streaming app to get to Netflix and I can't get in through a Netflix direct app because they want me to sign up and pay a second fee.
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.
Can you connect your Mac to a different network to help rule out the issue being related to your network connection? This would be trying an Ethernet connection if available, or just a different Wi-Fi network connection: Connect to the internet with your Mac
My observation is that the Video Quality seems to dip in and out and at one time I thought it was the network. Running the Activity Monitor and watching Safari network activity and throughput suggested that every time the video deteriorates the network went slow - not the network but Mac's access. I thought I'd found it by removing a PROXIE setting and selecting Auto Proxy Discovery. Then, instead of allowing the Location to be Automatic - set up a new location with NO customisation. Every try improved the time between quality going from "Good to Best" (Amazon video definition).
But, it still seemed to happen - on all browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Safari. So it must be my MAC - where next? Well, watching Amazon Sport using a Private browser Window seemed to be the answer. What is loading and causing Safari to loose video quality? It's not the few extensions (switched off-even uninstalled) - it's not WiFi (used Ethernet connection the router) but, Private browsing fixes the problem - why? Don't know.
It's true unfortunately, I'm afraid I was too premature in reporting the workaround. I also had big hopes when I found that >Preferences >battery >Battery >uncheck "Optimise video streaming while on battery". Unfortunately, all these things seem to improved the time between video quality degrading episodes, but they don't fix the problem permanently.
Problem is, that for me, Safari is the browser I prefer and I want it to work. I'm sure that I have observed this HD degrade in Brave, FireFox and Chrome - so maybe we should be concentrating on the MAC. Why I say that is; "sometimes" when selecting a web video to play, the target tab turns black and there is no activity - if you then HotKey "option + Command + E" - you may need to have activated the Develop Menu is Safari Preferences (last item on the Advanced Tab), then as soon as the cache files are cleared the busy ring starts running and the video loads. May be a helpful clue?
yea this is nuts. even since jobs left us ,apple is screwing the pooch waaay too often . and i wish people would stop giving instructions to re-configure the entire setup or change an app or some crazy thing.
if my computer was streaming a particular site and now i installed an update /new mac os and now a particular thing isnt working . its a crap written codec . lets just get it fixed OR explain the setting that some apple clown added and turned ON instead of leaving it off for default .
I for one don't think that investigating ways to "work around" this, is in any way an attempt to fix it. But our experiences may be helpful to others. Finding a clue that could lead those, who do code Safari, to a code interaction with the OS that is causing the symptom we see. By the way, I've yet to hear anyone complain of Safari's video performance on iOS. To that end, I've added AddBlocker and other extensions I use in macOS and have tested them in iOS extensively without finding this "fuzzy streaming"
I've found that Apple have gained my trust and respect through the years. I wonder if you have ever worked in the "guts" of any complex IT environment? I've worked in IT since the '60's and swapped from an IBM PC (although I worked for them for 25years) to the Apple 1 in the late 70's - nothing ever released in IT is perfect and even if it is, there is no way it can be seen to be when it is added into a constellation of other software. The interaction between the 5 Apple products I use, is simply amazing and magical (defined by an awesome wonder on how they work). That some of these reactions may be broken or less that reliable is simply a given - that there are so few to complain about is a testament to;
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