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by yeahsure 2889 days ago
Well, there are plenty of sites hosting pirated movies that are run by a couple of people.

At the end of the day -unless you really know how many tech/human resources something like netflix needs- you could wrongly asume a few guys could host the content on AWS, use a third party for billing and be done with it.
2 comments
zaphirplane 2889 days ago
Their technology isn’t about here is a list of movies enjoy, their tech is about enticing people to watch thru List, recommendations, trends ... etc just like Uber isn’t a taxi company most of their tech is about optimising the pricing
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StudentStuff 2889 days ago
AWS is totally uncompetitive if your looking to serve video though, Amazon's bandwidth pricing is something straight out of 1999, it is one of the largest pieces of their moat to lock people into AWS.
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mayniac 2889 days ago
I'm one of those people the comment above you mentioned who runs a site hosting pirate media (it's all private before anyone asks)

Looked into AWS a while ago so I could throw some encrypted containers on it thinking it would be cheaper. Storage on S3 would have cost about four times as much as I'm paying now in VPS costs, and EFS (the service I actualy wanted) about ten times as much, and that's before looking at bandwidth. Oh and I'd still need at least one VPS to handle transcoding, content delivery etc.

I think Netflix save money by using S3 for the majority of their storage but having their own CDN so they use less bandwidth from AWS.

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