>It does reduce flexibility when new video formats get released though.
A new video codec is released and adopted once every ten years. So I dont think it would be a problem. Hardware encoding also trade compression quality for speed. And they are compensating it with slightly higher bitrate. It will also reduce their incentives for improving open source encoder.
Although I think even Netflix switched to BEAMR ( Cant really blame them though )
I think the next frontier, for both Audio and Video will be Codec designed with LiveStreaming / Low Latency in mind.
( Or pretty much everything computing, I wish we could focus on latency, from Hardware Input, Display, Network, Disk, etc. Apple is certainly moving in that direction without talking about it. )
I was talking with a Netflix product manager a few years ago and, IIUC, he said Netflix re-encodes their entire catalog monthly to take advantage of new encoder optimizations. Disk is cheap. They want to optimize network transfers to both save money and improve user experience.
Netflix has about 36,000 hours of content. On Youtube that much content is uploaded every 1 hour and 20 minutes! Or to put it another way, Netflix re-encodes every month what YouTube encodes in just over an hour.
I don't know the reliability of these sources, but according to one article[1], as of 1 year ago, US Netflix had ~5.8K titles, totaling 36K hours of content. Another more recent source[2] claims that worldwide, Netflix has ~15K titles, so assuming the same distribution of runtimes, it would be closer to 93K hours of content. So, while you're correct, it's still the same order of magnitude.
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: a slacker suffering from insomnia watching 5 streams of Netflix at once × 20 hours/day × 365 days non-stop would otherwise watch the whole catalog in less than a year.
If we unpack your calculation to slightly more typical human behaviour: Watching 1 stream × 10 hours/day × 365 days non-stop, one person would need 10 years to watch the whole catalog.
FWIW, that conversation about Netflix re-encoding their catalog monthly was from about seven years ago! Their process has surely changed since then. :)
Also, IIUC, they re-encoded about once a month, but the re-encoding didn't necessarily take one month of compute time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925307
>It does reduce flexibility when new video formats get released though.
A new video codec is released and adopted once every ten years. So I dont think it would be a problem. Hardware encoding also trade compression quality for speed. And they are compensating it with slightly higher bitrate. It will also reduce their incentives for improving open source encoder.
Although I think even Netflix switched to BEAMR ( Cant really blame them though )
I think the next frontier, for both Audio and Video will be Codec designed with LiveStreaming / Low Latency in mind.
( Or pretty much everything computing, I wish we could focus on latency, from Hardware Input, Display, Network, Disk, etc. Apple is certainly moving in that direction without talking about it. )