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Violet Mcdow
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.
do you offer access to Netflix in your listing? If so do you use your own account? Pay for another account? Make them sign in with THEIR account? I have a Netflix account myself and a ROKU I can hook up -- I just today got my first inquiry about Netflix in the unit. I'm wondering how others do it.
I have an additional device account, one for guests. If a guest doesn't have their own account, they can request me to set up access to ours as a guest viewer. Although after 2 years and many bookings, I have had only 2 requests for me to set them up. Most have their own account these days.
We have a guest account for Netflix and Hulu and an old iPhone with nothing else on it signed in for guests to cast to the tv, via google chrome-cast. Old fashioned but does the job at low cost. (We have no tv service.)
Hi Emilia, I'll just be starting to offer Netflix for my guest this coming month and thinking of the same set-up as yours (guest will have access to my account, but with a different user profile). I'd like to ask if you had any instances where your guests have messed with the other profiles on your Netflix account. If yes, what did you do? Or if not, what have you done to prevent this.
@Jose-Feliciano0, just this week I noticed the Grinch was watched on my specific Netflix profile and there were two young children staying in one of my Airbnbs at that time. It doesn't bother me and doesn't happen often. No one has ever messed with my settings or anything like that. I would say it is more frustrating when they log out of my account and into their own. I have to check every time I am turning over the space for a new guest that Netflix is correctly logged into the right account. I would never give my password to a guest so if they get logged out it would require me going over to the apartment to log them back in (luckily, no one has asked me to do that.)
Hi Jose, So I'm a little behind on this thread & I've been looking into all this stuff with Netflix & if you offer up your own account could the guest potentially mess with the other accounts on it. Anyway, their is a way you can lock your other profiles so they would only have access to the one you want them to have..
I have a "guest profile" for Netflix/Hulu/Amazon but it is still my account. The account requires a password to be modified in any way, including ordering movies that are not included in the subscription so there's no way guests could change or charge anything.
The only issue I had once was someone signed in on their own account, then messaged me claiming that someone was watching stuff on their account after they checked out. We didn't have any guests during the time they claimed this was happening and we had logged them out anyways, so I think they had left their account logged in elsewhere.
@Kelly1126 I have the Netflix account that allows for streaming on 4 devices at once. I just leave the account signed in. Same with Amazon: I'm actually not sure how many people can log in at once, but there has never been a conflict, maybe because Amazon Prime is pretty poor in Canada and there isn't much to watch. Some people choose to use their own account, but I do provide mine also so they can use it if they want.
We have Smart TVs and/or Roku's so that guests can access their own accounts. We remind them to sign out when they leave. We've also been using YouTubeTV instead of cable TV in some properties. So far, so good. The savings are great. Good luck with whatever you decide!
The biggest issue with these addons is the use of the Widevine Library that is needed for non ARM Systems to support the DRM. I believe there is no proper/legal way to repackage the Widevine Library into Emby and would need the user to manually acquire it.
This is currently done in Kodi either manually, or through a 3rd party helper script that either extracts the library from Chrome or Firefox, as Kodi can't legally include this library in it's install setup.
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