And then I always think, Netflix only has ~3,600 movies... My friend's Plex server has 4x that (in just movies). I'm also often underwhelmed by Netflix's engineering posts

But your mate doesnt have to stream them on demand to millions of people round the world.

They not only have to store the movies, but access and simultaneously stream them thousands of times from anywhere on the globe.

Imagine how many people are watching things like Stranger things series premiere at the same time.

Let me have a copy locally, then you don't have to stream it to me every time.

This is basically a scaling issue streaming platforms and publishers created themselves because of copyright.

It makes their product expensive, bloated, clunky and make pirated content much more convenient.

There are no excuses. Games are exactly like that. They just have to do better.

"let me have a copy locally" is a very naive view of the world. 1. netflix works also in places with horrible connections/terrible bandwidth 2. what would you do? preemptively download all the series, movies etc that they think you'll download? (that may work in places with good internet, but even there, how much disk space would you need like on a mobile device?) 3. most behaviour on netflix is "let's try to click on these random series/movies and see if i like it" so you'd be downloading things that you'll never come back to see.

I am not sure i understand your point...plus netflix has the HUGE problem of optimizing the stream as much as possible to give people fluidity in their experience (exactly for the - low bandwidth - connections)

My point is that many of the engineering challenges come from self inflicted wounds that could be overcome with more flexibility.

Giving the user a choice to pay less and run their own binary of netflix would solve most of those issues

1. Shitty connection: no problem, just wait for the movie to load.

2. Preemptive download: on demand pre-load

3. Stream optimization: would be solved by local caching and P2P offload

4. Mobile devices: either caching there (already a feature) or NAT punchthrough, accessing movies you already preloaded in your home infrastructure

5. Naive view of the world: I think many things we do nowadays would be considered naive. What, a computer the size of a chocolate bar in the hand of everyone? This just shuts the discussion off of new ways of thinking. My idea could be technically bad, but "naive" is just a way of saying "out of the common discourse".

"Giving the user a choice to pay less and run their own binary of netflix would solve most of those issues" why? netflix works well for what they want and how they want it to work. you can download things to watch offline already and the rest would benefit just a small percentage ot the world, which already has money to pay for the service. I agree that p2p would be a great solution to networking issues, but am not sure about the legal/technical consequences (again) worldwide.

Doesnt change the required infrasctructure. On Stranger Things premiere day you still have to have the download infrastructure to handle hundreds of millions of downloads simultanesouly.

Not necessarily, you need one download then theoretically torrents will do the rest. People don’t download directly from Netflix.

Just to add to it, torrent isn't piracy technology, it is just a sharing protocol. Netflix could very well leverage that to lighten distribution load. Didn't think of that, nice catch.

It's actually pretty wasteful that it doesn't work that way.

Im pretty sure that would be illegal, but even if not there would be such pushback at using customers own bandwidth to distribute their own content.

World of Warcraft was distributing updates as torrents 20 years ago. It was fine.

Netflix for instance running their own tracker, then clearly advertising an advanced tier with lower pricing, with good documentation on how to set up, is just enough

You cant simply start using your customers bandwidth to distribute your own content.

Who said Netflix was offering the torrent?

just throw it in the TOS >:^)

It shifts the transcoding load to the user and it loads the movie async so you don't need the full bandwidth, so of course it changes the required infrastructure needs.

If I understand correctly streaming seervices dont transcode. They hold different versions of the same media to directly play the sppuroted version to the client

> They hold different versions of the same media to directly play the sppuroted version to the client

those different versions are transcoded from a mezzanine source, by a massive system, which is the subject of the OP. you can't just write off the main task from the discussion

The 4K mezzanine source will typically be very high bitrate, perhaps 1 TB or more. So big that it cannot be repeatedly “distributed to clients for transcoding”.

So I’m going to download everything I might want to watch like it’s 2005 and I just got the first video iPod?

Do I download everything to my computer, iPhone, iPad, and multiple AppleTVs in case I want to start watching a TV series one place and finish watching some place else?

BTW, of course you can download video to mobile devices

Saying 2005 like it was a bad thing to own the stuff you had. I would much rather have it "the old way" instead of having my series be delisted from the streaming service mid season.

Just make a paid local tier, cheaper, but you need to load it and transcode it locally. Give the user a choice.

Unlike music, which was DRM free and could legally be ripped from a CD using iTunes. There was no easy legal solution for Apple to ship software that could rip DVDs. When the iPod with video came out, iTunes also started selling movies. The next year Apple introduced movie rentals .

Are you really suggesting that it would be a good mainstream product to offer video downloads - in 2024 - where people used a computer to download movies to a computer and then upload them to all of their devices? How then do they watch on their TV with the built in apps?

They setup their own Plex server? When I want to binge 30 seasons of South Park - some on my TV, some on my phone, some on my iPad, do I copy it to all three places?

What keeps track of what I watch and don’t watch?

In the apple ecosystem analogy, you would just need a time capsule-like device (or any server for that matter). A single copy would suffice. Locally, you stream as is, since wifi is more than enough for 4k content. On the go, after connecting to your server, if upload isn't enough, the server could transcode the movie scaling it down. Perfectly doable without having to have a copy in each device.

> Are you really suggesting that it would be a good mainstream product to offer video downloads - in 2024 - where people used a computer to download movies to a computer and then upload them to all of their devices?

If it was the sole offer, I think it would be too restrictive, but as a lower or cheaper/advanced tier, why not?

I had a Plex server setup that could do that. It was an old spare computer. iTunes can (could?) do that over a lan. That’s how the very first hard drive AppleTV worked.

It was a pain to maintain and had symmetrical gigabit internet. Most people have cable internet with very low upstream bandwidth.

But now you’re asking them to buy another device and what’s the benefit for them?

In today’s world, I would buy an Nvidia Shield that can do hardware transcoding.

But you can already download video to mobile devices ahead of time.

I have Plex with transcoded dvds locally that I can access anywhere with tailscale.

Streaming service just need a relay bastion to punch through NAT for the initial handshake. You just need a server running some kind of client in your own infrastructure.

You can download to you mobile device already

That would raise the price for storage

Put a cache in front of it?

Serving a shitton of files is sort of a solved problem. For huge bursts of a single piece of content you just need request coalescing and a few layers of fanout. If you know what content you can even pre-warm the top layer of the cache.

Sure, you need a lot of infrastructure to serve a lot of traffic. But it isn't complex infrastructure.

The hardest part of Netflix's setup is probably the player. Making it request the right quality for the network and device conditions. And IDK much about DRM but I'm sure that decryption keys add some complexity to it. Serving quick recommendations and other things are probably also much more complex than serving a small amount of fairly large files.

Alright, to release a video on a streaming platform here is what you need to do:

1. Encode the video in multiple different formats and resolutions for different devices 2. Encode the sound track in multiple different formats for different devices, and package those up alongside the video file 3. Encode the subtitles in various formats and languages

The number of combinations of the above is, by itself, super complicated, and if you pay close enough attention to the different streaming platforms you can see that they all get it wrong sometimes.

And remember that content is being ingested from multiple different sources, from internal studios to purchase agreements with small international indie studios.

Alright, so you got that taken care of, now you need to get the files out to CDNs. You have your ISP based CDNs, e.g. Comcast really wants to cut costs, you may possibly be running your own backhaul between your own CDNs, and then there are the large CDNs everyone knows of as well.

And video playback isn't just a static thing. People want to be able to pause a video on their TV and resume it on their phone, so every few seconds you are sending completion info on where the video is at, except some playback platforms are so locked down that they allow you to initiate sending data back over the network (!!!) so you have to find a way to estimate how much of the video the user has played back so far. Spend some time thinking how to do that, and you can imagine that it gets horribly ugly.

He should write a mastrubatory blog post about how effective his set up is... Hell he could do a cost comparison for running his service vs Netflix per month.

I think this is the year where I go back to stealing content, none of these services are worth it.

If paying for content is not owning it, then copying it is not stealing.

I am assuming you got the statistic from here

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/netflix-statist...

It also has 1800 TV series and how many episodes does the average TV series have?

How much does that cost to put together, just in storage?

> Haha used to be 1PB, stored completely on Google Drive (they had unlimited), but then they cut me off so I cut down to 300TB and switched to self hosting at a data warehouse.

> Now me and like 100 people share a ceph storage that we all pay $100/mo for. I think the current size is like 1.5PB

Netflix has rotations though, does it paint a better picture ?

It also has TV shows, I wonder how shows and movies compare regarding bandwidth, storage and offers.

This is a bit like complaining about AWS because you don't like the product selection on Amazon.

Except for any aspect of the post to actually justify the engineering effort it would either have to improve efficiency or save money. All while Netflix has increased cost, stopped account sharing, and introduced ads.

Net negative improvement for users whilst there was presumably some net savings or gains for Netflix.

They've from offering a competitive offering to offering a compelling investment, shedding any guise of caring about their users along the way.

Yes, the job of Netflix engineers is to help Netflix gain money.

Is Netflix offering their services as a platform now?

Not sure why that would matter, complaining about content in response to an article about infrastructure doesn't make any more or less sense if the infrastructure is available as a service.

But I do consider some of what Netflix does to be a platform. Most of it is platform in the sense that some of their open source offerings are commonly adopted such as Spinnaker. But if you look at the adoption of microservices at Netflix a part of that includes Conductor, an open-source microservice orchestration engine.

The Netflix developers that created Conductor left Netflix and formed a new company named Orkes to offer Conductor as a platform. So while its not operated by Netflix, the microservice efforts they've made have been turned into a service offering.

The way I see is Netflix is mostly sprawling implementation of mediocre Java stack which is typical of large IT department in F500 companies. But their relentless tech marketing and extremely high pay for work which is a wrapper around enterprise IT has created an aura of sophistication and cutting edge in many people's mind.

I don’t like Netflix’s content either but I’m pretty sure that’s not up to the engineering department.

I doubt the backed engineers have any say over the content side of the company so blaming them for that isn't really reasonable. And while it may not make it cheaper for you or improve the user facing interface again another team, it probably made it easier for them to maintain and debug and administrate, which is something all sysadmins and engineers should respect.

Don't be underwhelmed. It definitely makes your Netflix better: whatever you watch can be encoded better, which enhances quality and lowers the chance of a rebuffer interrupting your experience. And the improved encoding efficiency frees up money that can be spent on content production.

But you can also just enjoy the story of developer achievement!

> so we can maintain our rapid pace of innovation

so it will make things better, pinky-promise!

I'm happy to pay them for the occasional good content, that I'll then torrent (because fuck smart TVs), but ... their app/client/website and their system seems to just work. I'm sure there are many things to optimize, etc, etc.. but probably they could reduce their development (and ops) budget by 70-80% if they would stop fucking with the system.

though, of course, that'd require a drastically different mindset, different people, etc.

Yes.

> While it is still early days, we have already seen the benefits of the new platform, specifically the ease of feature delivery.

What features though? Oh maybe a sleep timer for the kids section so it turns off after 1 or 2 episodes? No, that would be actually useful but wouldn’t warrant a blog post.

Ways to make it better:

1) Implement Apple TV menu integration, like several other services do.

2) Bring back manual rating. My suggestions were way better then.

3) Like literally every other service that has parental controls: I wish you’d just give me a goddamn allow-list. That would be more useful than almost all other effort that goes into this stuff, and relatively easy. But almost nobody does it. It’s very frustrating.

Ways to save a lot of bandwidth:

1) Stop being the only major service that auto-plays video with audio behind the menu when folks are just trying to browse, or are just idling on the menu and talking, and in either case actively do not want that (I know there’s a setting now, finally, that sometimes kinda works for a while—how about flipping that default around?)

They have it in the article itself: it's why they were able to roll out a totally new plan tier quickly.

If you hate Netflix, why don't you cancel your subscription?

I mean, it depends? Obviously Netflix has extremely different priorities than 99.99% of the software in the world. Scale of operations is much different as well.

It’s available in most of the countries in the world, in a lot of varying devices, requiring a ton of different video processing pipelines, content delivery networks, infrastructure and etc. Even very “straightforward things” like downloading for offline viewing can be a significant effort to implement. Now think of audio sync, post processing, sub delivery, localization, partnerships and etc., you can see how you would need a ton of engineering effort to achieve it. Just the scale makes it much nuanced perspective during implementation.

You and me can dislike whatever content they’re delivering, but it’s very obvious how there are millions and millions of people who still enjoy it.

>>> It’s available in most of the countries in the world, in a...

You get that your post right here is a better pitch for Netflix engineering than their own engineering. Blog about some top those problems, the things that your doing that make your domain hard and interesting...

That's exactly what this post is about. It requires some background info to see the scale of their achievement, sure, but their choice is to put some of that burden on you, the reader.

Yes probably all of those things.

I’m not being wide.