[mynameisvlad]

Right, but that alone shows that the reason they didn't go for the cloud for those has nothing to do with the capabilities of it, just that the locations are not close enough to their userbase to make sense.

Put another way, if there was a cloud DC in each major city and Netflix hadn't already started using their own edge nodes, then there's nothing stopping them from spinning them up in each cloud DC as opposed to their own hardware. There's nothing inherently special about their setup except location.

Nothing about this situation says that Netflix "realized its "too core" to give to someone else." I don't quite understand how you're making that leap. Instead, they had a very specific requirement (that most companies don't have, mind you) that current cloud hosts can't provide. Nothing else.