Netflix Newsroom
media.netflix.com · Company blog · on HN since 2015
Netflix's corporate newsroom and company blog, covering its streaming infrastructure, cloud migration, content deals and product features.
What HN saysHN commenters link it mainly for the post on how Netflix works with ISPs and its Open Connect caching appliances that deliver most video traffic.
65HN people shared it
36linked it in comments
33stories submitted
2.2Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2015people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Some details on the Netflix CDN15 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 2Completing the Netflix Cloud Migration12 people · 9 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Evolving Proxy Detection as a Global Service4 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Fast.com now measures latency and upload speed3 people · 201 points · first shared 2018 · 122 comments on HN
- 5Linux performance analysis in 60 000 milliseconds3 people · first shared 2015
- 6Netflix Is Now Available Around the World2 people · 1.0K points · first shared 2016 · 497 comments on HN
- 7Netflix Will Be the Exclusive US TV Home of Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar2 people · 425 points · first shared 2016 · 255 comments on HN
- 8The Power Of A Picture2 people · 21 points · first shared 2016 · 12 comments on HN
- 9Goodbye Stars, Hello Thumbs2 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Ted Sarandos appointed co-CEO of Netflix2 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 11Helping Netflix Members Get More from Their Mobile Data Plans2 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 12Helping members who haven’t been watching cancel2 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Netflix Downloads1 people · 256 points · first shared 2016 · 119 comments on HN
- 14Fast.com, a New Tool to Check Your Internet Speed1 people · 161 points · first shared 2016 · 7 comments on HN
- 15Netflix puts free documentaries on YouTube for students and teachers1 people · 50 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
29athrowaway · 2019-09-22
They also have their own CDN, to reduce load on ISPs.
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
lvh · 2019-01-16
What about “Murica”? American ISPs have also had Netflix caches for years: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
niftich · 2018-06-26
I get what you're saying about the benefits of PaaS or other managed services, but Netflix serves most content (by volume) off of appliances [1] they ship to ISPs that feed into the network at points-of-presence somewhere close to an edge. They use AWS for logic and compute (including transcoding [3]), but video streams from this globally-distributed CDN [2].
[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ [2] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-… [3] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/high-quality-video-encoding-at-sca…
augbog · 2018-06-13
I have some friends who work at Netflix and it's crazy how far the executive team foresaw how Netflix would grow. I know they put a lot of resources early on into Open Connect which was to handle working with ISPs.
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
Apparently a lot of people (internally too) called them out it was unnecessary but it's paying dividends back now.
rockostrich · 2018-04-17
Their CDN is in-house [1]. They use cloud services for general computing.
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
jonknee · 2018-01-22
They stage their content directly with ISPs which it makes it cheaper and faster for everyone.
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
andyfleming · 2017-09-16
To be fair, Netflix only runs some of their infrastructure on AWS. Basically, if I understand correctly, their applications run on AWS and their delivery is through their own CDN built on top of various ISPs[1].
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
erikbye · 2017-09-16
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/netflix-i…
And,
> We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.
Source: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud…
Netflix still operates its own data centers and CDN to deliver video. This is not done on AWS.
kbenson · 2017-07-18
Ah, that seems to be fairly new. I found info that it was over 90% a little over a year ago[1], but I wasn't aware it was that high at that time either. Congratulations on getting everything self served!
1: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
otoburb · 2017-06-05
>>Then [Netflix] went ahead and worked with T-Mobile on Binge-On where they would throttle speeds and cap the resolution to 480p on their network which was also a troubling sign.
A year ago almost to the day, Netflix admitted[1] that they (not carriers) were pre-emptively lowering the resolution of Verizon and AT&T subscriber streams. The irony last year was that neither AT&T nor Verizon were aware of this until T-Mobile's CEO called them out on it[2].
At the time, I seem to recall this didn't impinge much on the consciousness of Net Neutrality supporters as it should have.
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/helping-netflix-members-get-…
[2] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11302446/netflix-admits-throttling-…
phamilton · 2017-05-16
Apparently, Akamai does about 30 Terabits/s[0]. Netflix does "tens of terabits per second"[1].
Essentially, Netflix is about as big as Akamai when it comes to content delivery.
[0] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/facts-figures.jsp
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
mcgoo · 2017-03-02
Netflix has edge caching deployed at "thousands of ISPs worldwide."
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
mioelnir · 2016-07-02
Unencrypted Netflix pushes 80~90+ GBit/s from their most recent OpenConnect revisions.
[1] https://twitter.com/ed_maste/status/655120086248763396
[2] https://twitter.com/scott4long/status/656219076629368832
[3] https://twitter.com/facepalm_tar_gz/status/710668912673751040
[4] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
toomuchtodo · 2018-11-09
> Imagine you could send an audio or video stream to potentially everyone with internet access in the whole world but would need to pay only for the bandwidth of exactly one stream. That would be very nice for you, or Spotify, or Netflix, but not such a good deal as the current one for your ISP.
This mostly happens with Akamai [1] and Netflix [2] CDN appliances on edge networks though (content caching boxes used to offload transit or peering fabric traffic). I'd argue Multicast didn't take off because of "tragedy of the commons" issues; ISPs don't want to support additional complex network routing technologies (at additional, substantial cost) when existing one to many unicast solutions (mentioned above) are sufficient.
[1] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/akamai/akamai-accele…
[2] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-…
notadog · 2020-05-23
Link to the Netflix blog post: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/helping-members-who-havent-b…
cthalupa · 2019-06-19
This seems unlikely - Netflix just finished their migration to AWS in 2016 after 7 years and has been quite public about it, and always has a major presence at re:invent, etc.
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud…
They've never used AWS for their CDN.
fulafel · 2019-05-30
Netflix actually moved from their own datacenters to AWS at one point. Though not the bulk streaming part.
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud…
theptip · 2018-04-17
They _had_ their own datacenters, and decided to move their control plane to the cloud (AWS) to avoid having to run the those datacenters themselves.
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud…
This was a big deal in 2008 :)
(Maybe there's an even bigger size where it no longer makes sense for them to outsource this, but bidding GCP and AWS against each other seems like a reasonable strategy for their use-case).
ceejayoz · 2017-08-08
> From September onwards, Netflix will become the exclusive US pay TV home of the latest films from Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar. - https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/get-ready-for-summer-on-netf…
That didn't last long.
tylerlh · 2017-07-18
The majority of Netflix infrastructure runs on AWS, sans content delivery AFAIK.
The transition to AWS was completed a little over a year ago and took several years to do.[0]
[0]: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud…
ar0 · 2017-03-24
> I already use Netflix for my video streaming.
To be fair, though, if AWS were to disappear your Netflix wouldn't work anymore. And given that it took them seven years [1] to move to AWS, I guess it would take them quite a while to move to Azure or Google or their own hardware.
For the logistics / shopping part I agree, though: I live in Switzerland, where Amazon doesn't ship much except for books and I have to say I don't feel I'm missing much. In fact, many local online stores which could develop because they weren't drowned by Amazon work better IMHO and at similar prices than the Amazon website.
[1]: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud…
GrinningFool · 2016-06-22
Netflix started with their own infrastructure[1] and migrated it all to AWS. Presumably this was more cost-effective for them.
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud…
brendangregg · 2016-04-26
"We look forward to offering all of our content everywhere and to consumers being able to enjoy all of Netflix without using a proxy. That’s the goal we will keep pushing towards."
-- David Fullagar is Vice President of Content Delivery Architecture at Netflix.
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/evolving-proxy-detection-as-…
trequartista · 2016-02-12
Actual blog post on the Netflix site - https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud…
amelius · 2016-01-15
Please have a look at Netflix' blog post about this issue [1]
Given the fact that they offer this little information, I think we have the right to complain. For example, this post gives no clue about what the true hurdles are in getting better licensing deals, and in what timeframe they will be resolved.
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/evolving-proxy-detection-as-…
otterley · 2016-01-14
Netflix's announcement: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/evolving-proxy-detection-as-…
> Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.
d33d33 · 2016-01-07
is it just me who is wondering why i can't see netflix' complete movie/series list before i register with my credit card ? Don't tell me, https://media.netflix.com/en/only-on-netflix#/all?page=1 is all they offer?
_mikz · 2016-01-06
The announcement https://media.netflix.com/en/press-releases/netflix-is-now-available-a… links to the full list of countries and territories where Netflix is now available https://help.netflix.com/en/node/14164.
But that is not 130 countries.
India and Russia are not there for example.