> Hurricane Electric charges only $400/mo for a full rack in their Fremont datacenter, along with 1Gbps of bandwidth, and 12A of usable power.
Wonder what if Netflix turns around, and blue oceans [0] its video delivery infrastructure [1][2], like Cloudflare did for text/html. We do know that video has all but eaten up the attention that text/html once had on the Internet [3]
There are some fundamental constraints there for both cases you mentioned, but more so Netflix. Their business model and physical infrastructure are structured around a small, popular, catalog. This enables dense storage utilization at the edge, optimizations like pushing content during troughs, etc. Because of that they're edge is generally optimized for a small number of bytes stored and a very large number of bytes served to clients.
Storing a large number of "cold" or "long tail" bytes is a different physical problem when it comes to storage and IO. And that's also the exact problem you have when hosting lots of third party content (or apps, or lambdas, or anything else). There you're also optimizing for bytes stored:served, but have to place it on cheaper media and with less duplication to make the physical space/power/dollar constraints work.
They certainly could change their business model and infra. But then they end up looking a lot more like a commercial CDN with hierarchal stores, more centralized POPs at IXPs, etc.
Disclaimer: Principal at AWS. Used to work on Amazon CloudFront and a bit of time in AWS Elemental, served a lot of video & streaming bits. Everything above is public domain knowledge.
I actually asked about this 3-4 years ago and finally got an answer from [1] jedberg @Netflix. Basically they are not interested. I do wonder if they think the same now that their subscribers base has somewhat saturated and are looking for additional revenue.
If you mean selling their video delivery infrastructure as a commercial offering, there isn't much Netflix can do that isn't already covered by YouTube, which has a massive head start to boot.
Wonder what if Netflix turns around, and blue oceans [0] its video delivery infrastructure [1][2], like Cloudflare did for text/html. We do know that video has all but eaten up the attention that text/html once had on the Internet [3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy#Concept
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738
[2] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
[3] https://www.wired.com/2010/08/ff-webrip/