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Amilcar Labrosse
[Updated 11/8/19] Netflix has announced that due to technical limitations, as of December 2, 2019, the Netflix streaming service will no longer be supported on several consumer electronics devices, including some from Samsung. This change will impact select 2010 and 2011 Samsung Smart TV models that were sold in the U.S. and Canada. Affected devices will receive a notification reflecting this change.
News of this round of support dropping has been filtering onto forums over the past few weeks, with Netflix users being given ample warning that come October 16th, their devices will no longer be able to stream Netflix.
We spoke to Cord Cutters News founder Luke Bouma, who has been covering the world of cord-cutting for many years, asking him about the fact that Netflix is choosing to discontinue more devices and what the best quick and cheap fix options are when it comes to getting back to watching Netflix. Bouma told us:
Netflix has a dedicated satellite website that promotes its supported list of devices, whether streaming media players, smart TVs, or game consoles. A list dedicated to devices in your region can be found here.
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've got a message on my TV when trying to use the Netflix app that it is no longer supported on my device!
Headed over to Netflix.com to find out what was going on and they have a tiny message on the supported devices page saying Netflix will no longer work on some pre 2014 devices. Maybe I should have been warned of this in advance? Seems a bit unfair Netflix!!
Anyone else going tv shopping today?
This so why I hate smart TVs, the physical TV tends to last a lot longer than the software which will inevitably stop being supported at some stage. The issue isn't with Netflix, but your television model. You'll be fine with an Amazon stick or similar as that is much cheaper to replace should that ever become unsupportable.
@Ponoka7 no lots of TVs don't have the smart functionality, I used to say just don't pay more for smart because it's not worth it, but now I actively avoid them because we had a smart TV that got corrupted in some way, crashed, and was completely unusable despite the hardware being fine, that doesn't happen to bog standard TVs, and seeing as TVs can last decades I don't want to have to replace more regularly because of the smart functionality, easier to keep software up to date with external devices.
This is why I never even look at the smart functionality when buying a new TV. It's always going to be a bit crap and then become obsolete. Buy a TV based on picture quality and price, and then get a Chromecast or fire stick or whatever for Netflix etc.
@CranfordScones it's not Netflix that isn't supporting, it's the hardware, the fault lies with the TV. Digital platforms will always continually develop to improve (customer experience, security etc) digital development is rapid and necessary. It's why I won't buy a smart tv (again!)
Rule one of "smart" shit is never ever buy anything that can't replace it. Cars, TVs being the two poster children for this.
My TV is merely a screen to my smart stick. My cars display just shows my phones Android Auto screen.
Salespeople don't like me very much.
Returning to your problem - plug a Chromecast or Firestick in and lifes good again.
Have you seen the following warning when you access Netflix on your device? Due to technical limitations, Netflix will no longer be available on this device after December 1st, 2019. Please visit netflix.com/compatibledevices for a list of available devices.
If you own a Samsung or Vizio smart TV, there is no definite word yet on what specific models will no longer be able to access Netflix next month. However, it is clear that older models will be affected. Specifically, Netflix will drop support for:
Netflix has largely been using the Microsoft PlayReady DRM. However, certain devices are still running Windows Media DRM, an older version of the software. Roku devices with the older software that are unable to upgrade to Microsoft PlayReady are the ones affected by this compatibility update.
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