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Mike Fowler
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.
Since updating to 10.15.4 Catalina, Netflix will no longer play in Safari. Every time I try to watch something I keep receiving the Netflix Error Code S7702 - 1003. I've done some searching around on the web and can't find anything relating to the code. This isn't anything to do with Netflix throttling the quality or struggling to provide a service due to the current situation we are all in, as last night I tested my Apple TV, PS4, iPhone, Smart TV & Chrome (On my MacBook). All of which started playing immediately. The issue seems to be local to Safari its self. I feel begrudged to start using Chrome as I much prefer Safari and believe it to be more secure.
I have a feeling it could be to do with security settings perhaps on Safari, but having a look I couldn't spot anything different. If anyone could shed any light on the subject, it would be much appreciated.
After the chat with the Netflix HELP center, it turns out from now on we have to reach Netflix without private mode on in order to watch anything on Netflix via Safari. So, you can still use Safari, but turn off the private mode when you want to enjoy Netflix ;)
unfortunately this doesn't work for me. In private mode I'm able to watch some movies. Only few of them. In normal mode I can see only the start picture with red circle which is still rotating and rotating and nothing more.
The problem is since the 10.15.4 upgrade, regardless of private or public browsing. The only solution I have found is to play Netflix on Firefox (probably other non-Safari browsers would work just as well).
Hi! Was having the same problem on my MacBook Pro 2019 Catalina 10.15.4. Fixed by doing the following. Safari > Preferences > Privacy > Manage Website Data > Search "Netflix" > Remove, then Force Quit Safari and try Netflix again.
Hi guys. The Microsoft Edge is my favorite browser of all times, really, but not when I try to watch netflix or other video streaming services, it always breaks, I have no ideia what to do anymore. Always when I try to play something there's an error and then I need to reload over and over again, sometimes even when I just play the video it stop working when I try to play again. Help me to keep using this best browser that I've ever seen.
I've ever tried to disable hardware acceleration, enable DRM content, install Microsoft Silverlight and a lot of other things, but I didn't get to watch so far without an error I keep receiving these error codes: D7356-7701 and others related. Is there's still something that can be done to really fix theses erros or I just have to be patient and wait for news versions of the browser?
Hi! I have recently purchased this magnificent grand OLED TV and have been enjoying for the past 2 weeks. When watching Netflix (mainly) I noticed from time to time the colour changes to what looks like Sepia-ish or tri-tone colours. I had no idea what to do at first and definitely certain it is not a Netflix setting issue.
I found that all I had to do was to just to exit the "Action Menu > Picture" menu by clicking "Back". A few seconds later, it will switch back to normal colours. I have not done any changes to anything doing this. Really strange!
I've owned a Sony KD43XG8305 for a few weeks now and noticed the same whilst watching Netflix. See below where the image changed from the scene on the left to that on the right within seconds...
But, the same issue as present on my Samsung TV and using Netflix on my PC. I brought this up with Netflix who have yet to respond.
This is perfectly normal when watch HDR content as it requires changing the colour profile of the screen to enhance the content you're watching (which it does), but the menus and other elements that aren't optimized for this colour profile will look strange (since they don't change accordingly to compensate for this effect).
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