oh, remember the time that renting a gently used copy of home alone on VHS and settling down in the glow of your CRT tube television with a big bucket of popcorn?
of course, once the Internet came along and Netflix with it, Movie stores became all but a memory as there are now only a dozen of them left.
During periods of peak usage, Netflix accounts for over 1/3 of all downstream Internet traffic in the United States. But exactly how do they fling videos to so many people at once do they just have one giant server farm that constantly pours episodes of House of Cards and Family Guy on to the Internet backbone.
how do they fling videos to so many people at once?
Not exactly like many other large sites focused on media delivery Netflix uses a content delivery network or CDN to store and transmit movies and TV shows you see although Netflix's entire library could certainly fit on a few servers housed in a single building there are some problems with this approach what locations far from that facility would suffer from high latency not what you want for streaming video.
To this architecture would be basically the definition of a bottleneck since a single connection that fast doesn't exist and if it did it would be astronomically expensive and free. It would mean a single point one location a city and solve these problems by utilizing redundant servers in multiple locations to serve many geographic areas more quickly to balance server load between them so they don't get overworked and to ensure that there will be backups in case of an incident outage at one or even several locations but Netflix, in particular, takes this concept a step further because they are so big they actually work directly with a number of ISP's to install their own hardware.
These boxes called openconnect appliances at either exchange points or even within the ISP's facilities themselves holding up to 280 terabytes of video each.
These come preloaded with close to the entire Netflix library So what this means for you the consumer is that instead of connecting to some super far away land server to watch a movie you're connecting to an appliance at your own ISP that's much closer; cutting down on latency and making it's way to your screen so that your Netflix data packets don't have to fight with all the other Internet traffic that is upstream from your time for catalog updates.
Netflix pushes them to these appliances during the morning when there's typically less Internet traffic overall meaning that by the time everyone gets home from work, ready for a night of binge-watching the repository of content at their ISP has already been updated and is ready to go and if lots of people fire up their computers at once the appliances are equipped to push out data at over 90 gigabits per second the equivalent of over 13,000 people watching HD movie at once.
Then if that's not the bandwidth required then Netflix can just install more boxes for larger ISPs that serve greater numbers of people but to keep the speed, Netflix hides the openconnect boxes only handles storing and transmitting video for everything else for keeping track of what shows you like, recommendations, billing, logins and the search feature.
keeping track of what shows you like, recommendations, billing, logins, and the search feature.
Netflix uses Amazon Web Services or AWS; a massive cloud processing service that Netflix can quickly buy more time on a form of virtualized servers as their customer base and traffic volume grows and it's also very failure tolerant due to high amounts of redundancy.
Also, ever heard about the Amazon Prime Video thing? A Netflix competitor? that they're trying to get everyone to buy? why in the world would Amazon letting Netflix; a huge competitor use its servers?
Amazon does make quite a bit of money from their deal with Netflix
Well, Amazon does make quite a bit of money from their deal with Netflix possibly into the range of hundreds of millions of dollars, and may not want to start pushing out certain customers just because they might compete in a different market segment. We think of how Samsung manufacturers chips that Apple puts in their phones because Amazon wants to be the go-to company for cloud processing.
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