[laumars]

> When was the last time ABC or Fox went off air?

Broadcasting TV and Netflix are a very different payment model though. Broadcasting get their money from adverts. So even a couple of minutes of outage could cost them tens of thousands in terms of compensating sponsors for lost ads (depending on when the outage is as not all ad slots are worth the same). Where as Netflix is a subscription model where an outage is an inconvenience to their customers but they're not directly losing money (aside engineers overtime fees etc). Obviously Netflix could potentially lose customers but that's not going to be at a high rate from a single outage like this.

This distinction is can change dynamic of how you build broadcasting infrastructure. eg redundancy equipment is typical in any high availability deployment but broadcasting will not only have redundant physical equipment in different physical locations, but will often also have a second set of redundant hardware in each location purchased from different suppliers and running different software just in case it is a software / hardware malfunction specific to the product. Whereas in internet streaming services the emphasis is more on standardising software stacks to aid scaling - which makes total sense in terms of cloud services but that does still give you a potential point of failure (eg poorly tested Puppet or Terraform code getting deployed to prod).

Local US stations might not have the same level of redundancy as their national counterparts, but like the distinction between Netflix and traditional broadcasting if a financial one, equally the difference between ad revenue for local vs national broadcasters would be massively different. Ultimately the more costly it is for your service to be off the air, the most you'd expect to invest into your infrastructure to ensure you don't have any such outages.