[zaidos]

That is the core of their product. However, there are a lot of by-products and back office software needed to run the company. As a consumer, you most likely are only perceiving a small percentage of the technology running a company.

- Applications for all devices Netflix is on (TVs, Phones, Displays, Roku, Apple TV, etc.) and all the support around it.

- Recommendation and analytical software within Netflix. Not even accounting for other areas of the company where ML can be applied.

- Billing and financial software for Netflix users and partners

- Proprietary/internal customer support software

- Content management system, along with all the international and legal challenges around that.

- Any/all software used by their marketing teams

[inopinatus]

* Operations and control plane for all of the above that is robust enough for SREs to deal with million-to-one-chance occurrences happening every few minutes.

* Complexity multiplier (variations of contracts, catalogues, infrastructure, language, currency, payment methods, taxation, government regulation, corporate governance, market structure, customer preferences) of offering service in >100 countries.

The suggestion that building a service like Netflix is a "solved problem" is naive to the point of idiocy.

[emptythought]

Another thing worth noting is that they still support basically every piece of hardware they ever did. Think built in apps on old smart TVs or early blu-ray decks that haven't been patched in YEARS, devices from before 2009~ even.

You can still watch netflix on an original Wii. That hasn't gotten any OS or software patches since like 2011. That's a long tail of legacy clients to have to deal with.

[LocalH]

For the record, the official Netflix client for PS2 (only legitimately released in some South American countries) was discontinued and is unsupported. I'm guessing they moved exclusively to H.264 at some point (no idea what codec they served prior to that point, but to be playable on the PS2 it would have either had to be MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 ASP/Xvid)

[toast0]

Given that streaming is basically competing with discs, it makes sense not to drop any devices ever; a DVD produced today is expected to work on a DVD player from however long ago, provided it's still operational.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

Most of these stuff are also done by large corporate IT departments such as banks. They all consider it pretty routine and are not writing engineering blog posts.

[yomly]

Maybe the engineering community as a whole be better for it if so much duplication of work wasn't going on behind closed doors.

Sure, you don't want to publicize things which could be a competitive advantage to your company, but I bet these banks of yours wish weren't sitting on huge heavy custom-rolled COBOL codebases right now...