Are there any posts that analyse how the economics of offering $10/month streaming plans work out? Since they are hosted on AWS, data transfer is expensive, and coupled with the licensing of the content they serve, how to they manage to offer streaming at such a low price point?
Netflix doesn’t stream from AWS. Rather, they’ve built their own video CDN[1] with PoPs all over the globe. All of their user-facing streaming happens from their CDN. Their AWS infrastructure is used for billing, transcoding, playlists, etc. Also, they perform some seeding of the CDN from within AWS, but the seed boxes themselves can seed each other as well.
All in all, they clearly do push huge amounts of data out of AWS, but that data account for a very small percentage of the total data that gets pushed out to clients via their CDN.
I talked with the CenturyLink tech who hooked up my fiber and he mentioned they had just wired up some 40 gigabit appliances. This was in Utah. They are all over.
> Open Connect is the name of the global network that is responsible for delivering Netflix TV shows and movies to our members worldwide. This type of network is typically
referred to as a “Content Delivery Network” or “CDN” because its job is to deliver
internetbased content efficiently by bringing the content that people watch close to
where they’re watching it. The Open Connect network shares some characteristics with
other CDNs, but also has some important differences.
Netflix began the Open Connect initiative in 2011, as a response to the everincreasing
scale of Netflix streaming. We started the program for two reasons:
1) As Netflix grew to be a significant portion of overall traffic on consumer Internet
Service Provider (ISP) networks, it became important to be able to work with
those ISPs in a direct and collaborative way.
2) Creating a content delivery solution customized for Netflix allowed us to design a
proactive, directed caching solution that is much more efficient than the standard
demand driven CDN solution, reducing the overall demand on upstream network
capacity by several orders of magnitude.
One doesn't host bulk media in AWS. Netflix runs everything except that on AWS. I've contracted for two streamers that also used AWS for most things, both of them used CDNs rather than AWS for serving the big film files.
