[mmahemoff]

Shouldn't be a scale issue. The number of previews required is O(N) where N is the number of videos, not the number of users, and for Netflix, that's very small compared to a user-generated video site like YouTube. With 10,000 videos (what seems to be an estimate), you could spin up a bunch of EC2 instances and render them in under an hour.

As for serving them, it's also trivial to host on a CDN and serve them on demand (on rollover).

Possibly they'd need to work it into their licensing agreements.

[duaneb]

I'm more talking about the data migrations necessary to support the thumbnail fetching. At that scale (including all the bureaucracy), it's slow.

[ryaso]

And (likely) tooling for altering/fixing samples, and (likely) updating their transcoding process to include thumbnail generation at all the various sizes and qualities they encode for, and backfilling all the existing titles to fit into all such tooling, and coordinating such a project across what are likely multiple teams with different roadmaps and reporting structures, and doing it all without service interruption (lockstep deployments of all the various moving parts).

So much slow in large organizations. So much.