[PuffinBlue]

You're not wrong per se but Netflix takes a similar route to Google Global Cache in that they provide the hardware and place it inside the networks of other ISPs etc etc. So it's a CDN in the sense its a distributed content delivery network but not in the sense that they just use large traditional CDN providers.

Netflix provides massive storage boxes to ISPs that serve content from within the network of the ISP the user is connecting from. This can save the ISP a lot of external traffic so they generally want to do this to save costs and meet customer demands. YouTube does a similar thing.

They call it OpenConnect:

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en_gb/