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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.
Unbelievable that in this day and age, we cannot pause, rewind, FF live tv using Xumo/Spectrum App. We received our Xumo devices this week, hooked them up, thought they were great, until I wanted to go to the bathroom and tried to pause what I was watching. Nope, cannot do that. We are back to our cable boxes. However, I might keep the Xumo devices, since they are inexpensive, for streaming and in the hopes that they figure out how to add pausing live TV.
In order to rewind live TV there needs to be something recording and storing content as it is watched. Even traditional cable needs a DVR to do this, and we do offer a Cloud DVR service which can grant those capabilities through the Spectrum TV app.
At this time no device that has access to use the Spectrum TV app has the ability to pause/rewind/fast forward live TV. That is only an ability of the physical DVR boxes we offer. There is no information as to if or when this function will be available on the app.
I'm sorry, we do have Cloud DVR service that will allow you to start an in-progress recording and then view that recording with rewind/fast forward up until live. I will be happy to forward your feedback about this feature without the DVR.
We just received our xumo and started spectrum streaming. We cloudDVR the national news every evening. It appears that we cannot fast forward through the commercials and unwanted stories with the xumo but our Roku will do it. What am I missing???.
Just found the same issue. These devices have a long way to go. The progress bar on recorded shows do not differentiate between the program and commercials and is not easy for seniors to figure out how to fast foward and remind. Spectrum needs to take some features that are included in many of the other streaming services and add them to this app to make it viable.
If you are not able to you should add the feature because it's a pain to do it without being able to see the picture while it's forwarding to see when you are at the end of the commercial. You have to keep stopping to check and usually you overshoot and have to rewind.
At this time pause/rewind/fast forward on live TV is not available on any device using the Spectrum TV app. This feature is solely available on the physical DVR boxes. I can definitely forward that feedback up for you as well.
Xumo is a rolling train wreck. Constantly get error messages either channel or program we are watching live is unavailable, recordings are unavailable while in midstream (same error message as with channels), switches channels to some random one, shuts off, unable to preview while fast forwarding, cannot page up or down, cannot get to what you want to watch via guide (must input channel number while not in guide), & finally, remote that works only when it wants to. Had tech replace line to the house & now on to the 2nd box. Nothing has helped!
I have the fastest internet available and my xumo box is about 4 feet from the router, but when watching channels in the Spectrum app, it periodically buffers for a few seconds. Sometimes almost as bad as dial up internet back in the 1990s. If it's on a music choice channel, the sound periodically stops for a second or two, then skips ahead a few seconds (I guess to catch up). A teck is coming the day after tomorrow. I'm curious as to weather or not others have experienced similar issues with xumo. Also, doesn't have the option to rewind a show your watching? Seems like it's lacking a lot of features that Comcast and Cox have in outer parts of the country . Fingers crossed the tech can fix the issue.
Thank you for reaching out to us. I am not sure what troubleshooting you have already completed. Have you attempted to reset the Xumo box and the internet equipment. The modem and router can be reset by unplugging the cable line, power line, and removing the battery backup if you have one for both the modem and the router for a solid 3-5 minutes. The Xumo box can be reset by unplugging the power to the box and then reconnecting it. Please try this and let us know if this helps out.
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