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Walda Caesar
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.
I am new to multiple Rokus. We are moving into new house and I have purchased Rokus for each room. When setting them up I understand that I can have them all connect to a single account or I can create individual accounts for each?
Even your Roku devices are connected to a single account, you can still view or watch different channels/contents at the same time. The purpose of linking them to just one account is to make sure that you won't be double-billed for any subscription that you will sign up for.
@iwasbutter1st, in addition to what @Strega said, if your subscriptions to the various streaming providers are directly with the provider and not through Roku then it doesn't matter what Roku account your devices are linked to.
If you've already set up the devices then you can verify the Roku account on each one by going to Settings->System->About and viewing the email address. You can also see what devices are linked to a Roku account by going to and scrolling down to "My linked devices". There is no way to change the Roku account on a device other than factory resetting the device.
I have the same problem. Internet signal good. When I go to settings and network, it indicates a green check for internet and wireless. I can use the internet on my laptop. In fact I am typing this on my laptop now. But when I try to use any of the Roku apps such as netflix, AmazonPrime, YouTube TV, I get messages like "failed to load content", or "no internet connection." I have unplugged and plugged everything multiple times. We have two Roku devices on different TVs. Same problem on each. I swapped out one Roku for an Apple TV box and had the same problem. I see that no one actually helped the prior writer. Has anyone had the same issue. Any ideas?
Didn't work for me. 3 devices, nothing changes, did all the steps. Internet went out and now I feel like I'm back to square one looking for a streaming device. Really need on call customer service, feel like searching through this page is pointless because of so many issues.
Greetings from the Roku Community, and thanks for keeping us posted!
We'd love to investigate this issue further. May we know how far your Roku device is from your network router? Did we recently make any changes to your network or network provider? How many devices do you have connected to your network right now? (e.g., TV, mobile phone, laptops, computer) Do you have cellular data so we can try connecting your device to your hotspot?
I have made no changes to internet services, no new equipment and have had Roku for about 4 years. There is a "not connected" error message. This has never happened before. The TV and modem have not been moved. There hasn't been a problem until 2 days ago. We have rebooted everything - router and Roku - Roku more than once. There are 2 bars out of 3 on the internet connection on the laptop - which has always been enough to stream in the past (I can stream Prime directly from the laptop). Have there been changes with Roku that require more speed now than last week? Do I need to upgrade the internet service speed?
A warm welcome here in the Roku Community!
We will be more than happy to take a closer look into this issue that you're having. Could you provide us with the serial number of your Roku device? What troubleshooting steps have you taken so far?
We have reset Roku probably 3-4 times, turned power off and on a few times, shut down the modem/router, reentered the PW on Roku, moved the TV around - but there was no reason to think that would help, as modem and TV have been in the same place relative to each other since before we had Roku. Perhaps the Roku model is just old and we need a new one.
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