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How Netflix Eats the Internet
pacopico writes "Every night, Netflix accounts for about one-third of the downstream Internet traffic in North America, dwarfing all of its major rivals combined. Bloomberg Businessweek has a story detailing the computer science behind the streaming site. It digs into Netflix's heavy use of AWS and its open-source tools like Chaos Kong and Asgard, which the Obama administration apparently used during the campaign. Story seems to suggest that the TV networks will have an awful time mimicking what Netflix has done."
Basically taking advantage of an infrastructure it doesn't pay for?
There is still too much content I want that Netflix does not have available for streaming, making it not worth the price.
Is it tasty?
One byte at a time?
They'll use their bought and paid for congress critters to get Netflix legislated to death and use their industry connections to get even more content taken away from Netflix to keep them under control...
Comparing TV networks to Netflix is like comparing an ancient Spartan soldier to a modern, fully armed, US Marine.
I just heard another news story that said it's 3% of all internet traffic in the US at night. That's a pretty big discrepancy. Given all other services like youtube and Hulu and all peer to peer, I seriously doubt it's 1/3. It probably is 3%.
I would be more than happy to be able to actually download movies from Netflix during non peak times to watch at some other time. This would allow spreading out the bandwidth over the course of a day instead of everyone streaming at peak times such as 7PM EST,CST,PST
Streaming services will continue to degrade our bandwidth unless we are given the ability to download movies\shows during off hours to watch later.
If I've learned anything from Sid Meier, it's that spearmen are damned tough bastards to beat when they want to hold their ground.
Comparing TV networks to Netflix is like comparing an ancient Spartan soldier to a modern, fully armed, US Marine.
You give the TV guys far too much credit. Your hypothetical Spartan soldier would, of course, be doomed by inferior technology; but it is unlikely that he would resort to petulant litigation or pernicious lobbying.
He learned that from the British.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It eats the Internet too, eh?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
You realize you're talking about Grecian society that quite literally gave us those things, right?
Pffffft ! That's so retro. Torrent / Plex is more efficient and flexible. Combined with the fact I torrent off Chuck'E Cheese / McDonald's / whatever WIFI and I get to take my kids out, the whole experience is where value's at. Besides, Netflix content sucks.
last I heard they were using Limelight as CDN. Anyone who thinks they are streaming directly to users from amazon is delusional.
Or, after you've pounded the opposing civilizations into the dust, they have one city left with "one" population, then they produce a "warrior" unit that takes out your stealth fighter. WTF?
North America is not the internet merely an uncivilsed backwater of it.
I'm pretty sure that Athens did a lot more of the heavy lifting on that side of things. They also had perks like 'culture' and 'occasionally not existing in a state of total war'; but their legal and political shenanigans are quite legendary.
'tv networks' are still in the screaming MINE MINE MINE MINE phase...
they won't even try doing what netflix has done. it won't even occour to them until they're broke and gone.
i hope cbs and fox go cable only over their hissyfit about aereo. and i hope they go alacarte so i don't have to pay for that shit. and then i hope they go bankrupt because nobody watches that obsolete shit.
its the only way they will learn.
Internet2. That would have the bandwidth to do everything they need.
I pay for Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, NHL Center Ice
What do you do for NHL games that are blacked out of NHL Center Ice because they are shown on national or regional cable television? Last year the freaking finals were shown on what is now NBC Sports Network, a cable channel.
If they used modern H.264 and AAC encoders rather than whatever outdated VC.1 and WMA encoders they're using, they could cut that bandwidth use by a third, reducing their costs and improving the customer experience tremendously. Does anybody know why they haven't already done this?
I can always wait for DVDs.
Including DVDs of sporting events that are blacked out of the league's online service because they are shown on national or regional cable?
I don't care how advanced Netflix's architecture and infrastructure are, they still use unsolicited commercial E-mail--spam--to advertise their services. I've seen it. Other people have seen it. I do not do business with spammers. Period.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
You appear to be in an Apple household. There's a DVD slot on Macs until very recently, and even if not, you can add a DVD slot by buying a USB DVD burner for about $30 on NewEgg.
If any sports franchise (major league, NCAA, etc.) were to get a streaming contract that doesn't require a cable/satellite subscription, it would be the beginning of the end. I think they realize that, and is why they lock down things like ESPN3 or NFL Gametime, etc. Sports is where the revenue is for the operators...not channels like Syfy.
It's possible that that figure was only on Internet2, which has mostly academic users. Or is Netflix using BitTorrent for their downloads?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What is netflix ?
aaaaaaa
Such as sports. If I were to replace cable TV with Netflix and NHL Center Ice, games shown on national or regional cable TV would be blacked out.
To be fair, let's limit it to scripted works more than a decade old. According to CanIStream.it, Netflix doesn't have the film Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, the film Song of the South, the film Secret of the Incas, or the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea.
Back in the old days, when Netflix worked by mailing physical DVDs, their bandwidth was about 1/3 of the total bandwidth of the Internet. They had a much higher latency (~48 hours), but a huge amount of parallelism and 4GB packet sizes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Comparing TV networks to Netflix is like comparing an ancient Spartan soldier to a modern, fully armed, US Marine.
You mean the Spartan soldier that will sneak around, hide, and then throw a spear accurately to kill before the marine even knows where he is? Because Spartan soldiers were pretty good at that.
Netflix charges 8 dollars a month for offering more content than many people who pay 100 dollars a month get from their cable subscription.
One household in my survey sample keeps cable TV around for NCAA football, NFL, NHL, and UFC. Another keeps cable TV around for MSNBC. Netflix doesn't offer such live programming.
Better idea just upgrade the internet connections.
Say you want to watch 24-minute episodes of a TV series on your 30-minute-each-way bus commute to and from work. To stream on the bus, you'd need an expensive cellular data plan. And it's expensive because there's a limit to how many cellular subscribers can be served at once.
I don't want to decide what I am going to watch hours in advance.
You do if you're watching a whole season of a TV series in order.
I have no interest in leaving some machine on burning power to record a show for later.
Even if you have no such interest, millions of pirates using BitTorrent have such interest.
My AppleTV is connected to a computer-only LCD panel (it only has VGA, DVI and HDMI inputs, no built-in tuner).
I thought computer-only LCD panels tended to lack audio output. Did you have Apple TV in mind before you bought your computer-only LCD panel to make sure it had an audio output?
1. native linux client
2. local storage of download content - they can encrypt it, require phone home verification, whatever but let me store things I would want to watch later on my local machine, up to as much storage space as I care to allocate
I can't think of another business where the typical vendor prefers that his customer use less of the product he sells.
Golden Corral and other buffet restaurants.
A lot of BitTorrent traffic shifted to cyberlockers like MegaUpload a few years ago; I don't know if it has come back since then.
An ability to watch video while away from home.
Are you talking about over Wi-Fi or over cellular?
No need to purchase/rent a separate device to timeshift or store content.
Unless you're on a TV that doesn't have a built-in Netflix player. Then you need to buy a Netflix player, but I'll grant that this is often cheaper than a DVR.
No hidden fees
Other than the loss of the discount on Internet service that the cable company used to give for also having TV. Some people report their ISP giving them a TV subscription for almost no additional charge.
Yeah, but to extend the simile, the Spartan won't go down without a helluva fight. And he'll be kicking, screaming, and biting the whole time.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
This isn't as ridiculous of a request as it may seem. Caching music is what made me a Spotify customer.
From TFA:
They call me "18-Inch Guy", too... Probably for different reasons.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I think lots of us imagined the idea of a virtual rental service, where you rent out over the internet videos limited by the physical copies you have on your person. This would be similar to libraries or physical video rental services. The problem is you'd probably be sued. Netflix went about it the right way by doing a physical rental operation first.
God spoke to me
Dude, have you even seen 300?
I know /. thinks this is funny, but some communities still use carried pigeons + USB sticks because it offers far superior bandwidth to what is available.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
They also liked to have sex with little boys.
yup one was a highly trained disciplined professional and the other is an American
And who wants to add a big honking DVD player hanging off their iPhone or iPad mini?
If you bought the iPad to stream movies, then you should have checked for availability of the particular movies that you wanted to watch on available streaming services before buying the iPad.
One [carrier] will [upgrade its network] and the rest will have to follow.
Either that or all four carriers will decide to just kick off users who use what they deem excessive data transfer volume, just as all four decided at once to double the SMS rate from 10 cents to send or receive a message to 20 cents.
If you're getting internet from Comcast, you already get the OTA channels unencrypted for free
Not for long. See this story from October.
Oh just this once I wish they have tons of useless patents preventing the "man" from doing this easily.
Why? You object to Netflix being able to stream movies and other entertainment to millions of people who want it? I don't understand...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm still on one of the old unlimited AT&T plans
Are grandfathered plans transferable from one customer to another?
And if I still want to use my non-smart TV, I'm set if I have a game console
Not necessarily. Microsoft charges an extra $60 or so per year for Xbox Live Gold service to access your existing Netflix subscription from your Xbox 360 console. Someone who plays only single-player and offline multiplayer wouldn't already be paying that.
Of course if a buffet restaurant had a similar expense profile to an ISP, the food itself would be (almost) free...:)
How would it be free? Each transponder on each cell tower has only a limited amount of bandwidth to serve customers within the cell. And new cell towers are nowhere near free.
I know /. thinks this is funny, but some communities still use carried pigeons + USB sticks because it offers far superior bandwidth to what is available.
Bullshit.
Remember that Info over carrier pigeon can make you real money.
He had info, lied about it to make people go the other way, then cleaned up, based on info from pigeons.
Also Athens at its height was around 20,000 citizens (plus women and children who didn't count) and over 100,000 slaves who actually did all the work. In effect all that democracy and philosophy we treasure was brought to us by elite misogynist slave owners :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
That's a lot of traffic for a service that everyone I've spoken to claims has nothing good.
yes, there is even a proposed IEEE standard...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
They probably can break their bandwidth cost down per-customer (on average.) It obviously must cost less than shipping a DVD via the USPS a few times a month. I'm a bit curious how close that margin is. Are the saving a few cents per customer per DVD, or closer to thirty or forty cents? I suppose they probably wouldn't want to tell us if they could, for fear of giving competitors useful information.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I keep reading a third of the internet is porn, a third is bit torrent, 2/3 is spam, and now 1/3 is Netflix.
Where do you stand to measure this traffic. If it doesn't cross a peer is it traffic? Do I count each leg of a path?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Don't forget sneakernet. With USB3 portable drives we just upped the antie when it comes to sneaker-based throughput.
I can only imagine what'll happen to the internet when Netflex premieres the season 4 of Arrested Development. (May 28)
It doesn't get more obvious than this.
Idiots eat too much, drive huge SUVs, and waste their lives
watching worthless crap sold to them by Hollywood.
All I can say is, I hope the Chinese are making progress with that
air-transmissible avian flu.
Networking 101: Bandwidth != Latency.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Why exactly is this a good use of one third of the internet's capacity? And why is this morally acceptable, when the evil media companies charging to watch TV or selling DVDs isn't?
If copyright is bad, and therefore downloading from BitTorrent is a sound ethical decision, why does Netflix get a free pass?
You mean like the 300 guys that held off 100,000?
Comparing TV networks (actually Cable really) to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges. While both provide entertainment, they provide different types of content.
I find it quite funny always those comparisons: Xxx is using 1/3 of Internet, 10% of heavy users download 99% of normal users, etc.
But nowhere they tell you how much capacity is left.
You know that Netflix could create 99% of the whole of Internet traffic without affecting anything if there is enough capacity left?
"Netflix eats the Internet" says only something about how much Netflix is favoured by the Internet users. It says nothing about Internet capacity.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
THIS...IS...NETFLIX!
(apologies to Gerard Butler and Frank Miller)
...Just like the US and its Constitution... :)
(zigzags away)
Interesting how no one commented that maybe this isn't the best use of the Internet....... Shouldn't all these private companies and corporations be on a "business internet" and leave the WWW for us real people out here? Oh wait, we're all gun-toting, freedom-loving, god-fearing free-market capitalists. Can't have that, now can we?
To be fair google.com usb carrier pigeon is more key strokes than chevron, copy&paste + Bullshit.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
That was athens, not sparta, pick up a history book every now and then.
Sparta was a city-state of Greece. Thanks for playing.
Dude, have you even seen 300?
No. Netflix doesn't have it available for streaming.
Sure I sold you robot insurance. But you were attacked by a cyborg. Not covered.