[r3trohack3r]

Netflix serves nearly all of its video from a server down the street from you via its OpenConnect infrastructure. AWS only hosts its microservice graph that does stuff like determining which videos and qualities you should be offered.

That being said, its core product has been nearly comoditized. When Netflix entered the market, delivering long form high quality video over the public internet was nascent. Now everyone and their grandma can spin up a video streaming service from a vendor.

[scyzoryk_xyz]

Any chance you would be able to point me to a good source or article describing/explaining the first half of your comment? I.e. someone getting into the nuts and bolts?

Netflix is a platform - their strategic advantage is in their content sourcing and development pipeline which is fed the unique insights on audience preferences. This is distributed with recommendation algorithms and UX. It could be argued, like someone also already pointed out, that this infra aspect is a commodity at this point.

[miyuru]

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

there are attempts to serve high bandwidth throughput, I think the last update was below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40329303

[myvoiceismypass]

AWS also hosts all of Netflix’ internal apps (which probably dwarfs the amount of actual public facing stuff)

[meltyness]

I was aware of this, I think a talk about a performance regression on the BSD variant these appliances run was up here recently.

I mean I guess a similar argument holds for colocating with telecoms that would have recently been cable or IPTV providers.

It'd be pretty tough to design around though if any of their caching infrastructure reveals viewership, or engagement data to intermediaries.