[MichaelGG]

So there's 2 billion hours watched per month, but a few billion "view" events per day? So let's round and say 100B view events a month, so 50 events per hour viewed? I wonder if this is because people preview a ton of stuff they don't watch, or are they recording pauses, or ... ?

[jedberg]

Close, it's 60 events per hour. Ie. Once every minute an event is sent in saying "they're here now!". It's also sending a bunch of data about your quality of service and so on. This serves two purposes -- one is that in case you suddenly disconnect, at least it knows within one minute of where you left off, and two, it allows for monitoring the overall health of Netflix by taking the average quality of service and making sure it isn't dropping rapidly.

[MichaelGG]

Ah, well that makes sense. Though could you not store last position on the client then just sync on connect? Like, if handling so many events was too much a challenge. Or are crashes that big of a deal? At any rate, I guess that allows you some leeway with the writes - a few minutes of unavailability doesn't hugely impact anyone eh? Fun writeup.

[jedberg]

Many devices don't offer local storage to Netflix. Also, if your device crashes or your internet drops, there is a good chance that you're going to try and watch on a different device.

It makes for a much better customer experience if we don't have to rely on your device saving the information and calling home appropriately.

[BorisMelnik]

good point, not sure. maybe it is from people hitting play once and binge watching a series consecutively "your program will start in 3...2...1..."

[MichaelGG]

But since most episodes are at least a dozen minutes long, that should only generate like 10 events an hour eh?