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Argenta Sugden
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.
From my understanding, Streaming media services such as Amazon instant video, Netflix, and others do all decryption client side. What I do not understand is that if this is true, and the videos ever exist in a decrypted state, what prevents users from harvesting them en masse?
I've always been curious how streaming streaming media providers circumvent this issue. I know some streaming providers (free ones like youtube) simply acknowledge that it is possible to save the videos, and don't do much to prevent it, but I would imagine that it is core to the business model of companies like netflix to make it neigh impossible to save a movie once you've rented it.
Just to make that this question doesn't seem too broad, I want to clarify that a direct answer to this question would show me how streaming media providers prevent users from trivially downloading their videos (via obfuscation / cpu features perhaps?)
I doubt cryptography is ever involved, it's mostly a matter of obfuscation; if the attacker can break the obfuscation and reverse engineer their player applet, then they will do the same to get the key if crypto is involved, so why bother ?
Content providers used to use some garbage called Flash to create an applet capable of talking to their server over RTMP and get the video stream from there. Note that the video is only streamed, never downloaded to disk, so the only place the decrypted/deobfuscated frames ever exist is in the computer's memory for a short period of time; that limits the "exposure" to a level they deem acceptable (or rather, a level Hollywood is forced to accept because it's either that or not selling their movies on the Internet at all).
Now content providers are aware of the decline of Flash's popularity and are starting to use HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions, a plugin interface allowing a browser to communicate with the site's proprietary and obfuscated software that will be decrypting/deobfuscating the video frames before sending them back to the browser's media player which would play them; essentially the same thing as Flash except the proprietary applet now only does decryption instead of being the actual video player.
first off, it's quite hard and time consuming (but never impossible) to reverse engineer the Flash or EME applet and most people won't bother, they will either accept the restrictions or go somewhere else (unfortunately what they don't understand is that "somewhere else" also means "some pirate site" and they're loosing even more money by not letting honest users save the content they bought)
the content isn't downloaded in advance but streamed in real time, this allows some control over how much content can potentially be saved, as their server won't accept to stream more than one file (or a few if they're lenient) simultaneously per account, which means the pirates wouldn't be too efficient at ripping content from the site and will look for other sources, ie. physical DVDs or Blu-Ray discs which are rippable more efficiently and as a bonus offer more quality than streaming, so web-rips (as they call them) are often done only for content not yet available on physical media, as a way for pirate teams to be more popular by leaking the content before it's physically released
To capture Netflix on the computer, you can try EaseUS RecExperts, OBS Studio, etc., to complete the task. If you want to save it on your mobile phone, you can directly download Netflix videos within the app.
It's illegal if you screen record discs on Netflix because you are breaking the copy protection. And speaking of recording Netflix, you need to follow the Netflix Terms of Use and the country's copyright law in which you reside.
Netflix is one of the best video streaming services right now, with some fantastic video series. While it offers to download it for offline viewing, it is only available for smartphones. We often like to download movies and series on the computer and watch them later without the internet. Once you have the video on the computer, you can share it with your family and even cast it on TV, Xbox, and other DLNA devices.
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