Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?

Practice makes perfect! It was frustrating because I think I saw what you were going for and it's a good idea.

Don't be afraid to drop things, even if they're important.

You've got a title, right? "What happens when you press play". Answer that question. There's a whole load there that is interesting but doesn't answer the question of "Given Netflix have a bunch of video ready to go, how does that reach me?". Don't get me wrong, the rest is interesting, and important when thinking about Netflix as a whole, but ultimately I'm unsure they fit in the article.

You might be worried about missing important bits, I personally worry about losing readers. It doesn't matter how important something is, if my target audience quits 15% of the way through the article.

Anyway, no sweat really, blogging is hard enough. It's been a long time since I've written regularly, and I just started a personal blog, and yeah, a few weeks later im sitting on a mound of drafts I need to take a 'minimum viable post' eye to. :)

Merry Christmas!

You can't survive as an ISP if you don't have GGC nodes or directly peered with google DC. If your customer wants to watch youtube videos and you serve them through internet only, which will either mean you will have to buy more BW (not financially sustainable) or you will have to cap youtube traffic resulting in inferior user experience and a customer leaving your service. Or just ban youtube - might as well stop running an ISP.

The best solution is to peer with their DC - let them do the heavy lifting and you can pull from their cache, then you can chuck the GGC nodes. Google is building a small DC close to our NOC - which means lots of saving for us and a better experience for our customers. We can see us chucking the nodes or in this case, we most likely have to give it back to them or something - they are very expensive and large supermicro servers.

10:1 is not a lot if you are serving a lot of traffic. For 50gbps, thats 5gbps bw - that's a lot of bw for free service - we don't cap youtube traffic (users likely to watch high res 1080p, 4k videos nowadays), we can't sell youtube traffic (license agreement from google) - so as far as ISPs are concerned its pissing away money. To be honest services like youtube, facebook and Netflix, even with their on-premise cache solution are a huge headache and expense for ISPs - it's not just the BW, rack-space, distribution switches, power, they all add up.

There is a reason why Google with all their expertise, knowledge, money and influence can't even make a dent in their ISP business - because even with all their money - it insanely expensive when you try to cover most of the country.

Hmm I dont know what CDN or ABS are.

> I was referring to who did a large _volume of traffic_ in this type of distributed node first on a _global scale_ - not who did it / patented it first.

I am too.

For example, even back then we did live streaming events of millions of simultaneous viewers and billions of on-demand streams a month, from petabytes of content in 14 datacenters globally (including Southeast Asia). All before Netflix, Google, Facebook. Akamai and most of the top CDNs were clients.

> Outside NA/EU echo chamber Netflix is a blip...

Netflix is very much playing outside ‘the echo chamber’: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a20138/netflix-in...

And growing: http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/netflix-250-million-hou...

If you have stats that show they are ‘a blip’ in traffic volume globally, please share.

> I was trying to make a point on some info in the blog

By continuing to insist Netflix is “a blip”, and offering no definition of what you mean by large scale, or why you’re so sure Google is doing video delivery networking better, I’m finding it difficult to have a substantive discussion.

PS. You started an ISP in Southeast Asia, and looks like you had Google/Akamai footprint for your ISP. So maybe your ‘blip’ assertion is your ISP data? From the provider point of view, different ISPs (even in US) had very different viewing patterns. Without looking into individual ISPs, we guessed this related to median connection speeds, peering headroom, and localized content/viewing preferences.

> You can't survive as an ISP if you don't have GGC nodes or directly peered with google DC.

Believe me, you can. Deutsche Telekom, Germany's AT&T and Europe's biggest ISP, does this and in the evening YouTube videos regularly stutter on FullHD. But the customers just don't care enough.