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Netflix CEO Says Net Neutrality Is 'Not Our Primary Battle' (theverge.com)
Speaking with Recode's Peter Kafka at the Code Conference today, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explained his position on the current net neutrality debate that's happening at the FCC. Or, more to the point, he addressed the fact that he's been awfully quiet about it compared to how loudly he defended net neutrality in previous fights. From a report: "It's not narrowly important to us because we're big enough to get the deals we want," Hastings said. It was a candid admission: no matter what the FCC decides to do with Title II, Netflix isn't worried about its ability to survive. Hastings says that Netflix is "weighing in against" changing the current rules, but that "it's not our primary battle at this point" and "we don't have a special vulnerability to it." He does believe that smaller players are going to be harmed if net neutrality goes away, saying that "where net neutrality is really important is the Netflix of 10 years ago."
Yeah, that type of commentary is why people have serious issues with companies throwing their weight around whenever it suits them.
"Fuck you, we got ours!"
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
They are just being honest. There is nothing inherently wrong with a large company using its size to get a better deal.
It's all hubris. The major broadband carriers Don't care if Netflix thinks they've got theirs.
Once net neutrality is gone, they can push their own service --- unleash the rate limiting - service will degrade,
and people will be incentivized to switch to their carrier's streaming service.
read their new stance as saying:
we're big enough it doesn't matter to us anymore.. we really don't give one shit about our customers, other than that they remain our customers.. and new toll roads on the internet will keep startups from taking them away from us.
If (and it IS still an if) net neutrality is removed, I am going to laugh my ass off when the backbone providers tell Netflix that BECAUSE they are so big, they can pay out their ass.
I do appreciate the CEO being honest, but he is not thinking about the big picture. He may think that Netflix can handle the extra payola that will be required, but with that kind of hubris, I don't think he has really thought it all the way through.
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
FTFA: "It's not narrowly important to us because we're big enough to get the deals we want," Hastings said.
Gee, thanks a lot, asshole. Nice to see you have no regard for anyone but yourself.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Basically, they went to the other side.
It was never really about small companies or costumers, it was just about themselves.
Nowadays Netflix is big enough to impose their own demands and prices on ISPs and whatnot, and they in fact have all the interest on stopping new players in the market.
It's f*cking shameless to come up and say something like that with all the defenses they made back in 2014, sure, but it's also partially true.
But yeah, here, for those who don't remember:
http://www.huffpostbrasil.com/...
http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/2...
Consumers indeed deserve better, which is something Netflix apparently isn't willing to fight for anymore.
Certain large ISP's have agreed to only charge me X if I stop fighting for NN. Otherwise they are gonna bend me over a barrel. I'm good!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Without net neutrality there would be no Netflix.
Also, without net neutrality there will be no Netflix competitor.
that the more important fight for Netflix is content rights, since without content that people want to watch, net neutrality doesn't matter
in a net neutrality focused internet is basically what he is saying...
There are startups in the wings, we want to make sure they never grow.
Fuck you, Reed Hastings, right back at you.
Let's start flooding Twitter with #BoycottNetflix hashtag. Bet that'l wake the fucker up.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'd rather have corporate guys say this kind of thing than to bullshit me with other lies or bullshit.
Has anyone ever made a cent on slowing customer data? Or even an unfair peering agreement? The costs to enforce are not worth the potential savings from my seat.
Netflix has offered and most providers accepted to distributed their devices, called openconnect at ISPs regional headends. Traffic outside of account authorization and enablement transactions never leaves your provider and as netflix moves more than more traffic to end users they will expand their footprint closer to the end users. Perhaps they might drop a few bucks a month for the port/power/rack charge.
The providers are scrambling to build fat pipes into cloud providers to deliver 85% of the traffic to the subscribers and carry their inter region traffic. What is the point of charging on a peering agreement for a virtual routers in hosted on AWS that can be built and torn down based on bandwidth need. AWS does not charge the providers anything like the former big boys in meet me room.
What is another QOS class going to do at a nationwide network designed for entertainment delivery from the subscribers ISP? So we got some classes, ISPs Voice, ISPs Services, a machine within the ISP infrastructure, skypelike, cloud attached ISP or a subscriber to subscriber torrent. I know what another QOS class would do on properly sized and growing ISP/CableCo/Provider... put another line in a report with a zero Q depth. Utilization to everything but the cloud providers is going to be legacy traffic that will decay away.
Network Neutrality is a regulation in search of problem that technology is stepping past with cloud located services.
As a public company, there is a limit to how much resources they can throw into advocating something purely for altruistic reasons. They are right that they are big enough that this isn't a problem for them. They can pay for peering agreements, and if ISPs mistreat their customers, then ISPs will have a lot of angry customers. Furthermore, at this point, if the ISPs got rid of net neutrality and turned around and screwed netflix, it would probably quickly change a bunch of people's minds who currently believe we don't need government intervention and lead to people looking for a replacement.
This is a pretty good compromise (not to mention, they are still lobbying to some extent). They don't waste resources doing something that doesn't matter to their business, but they still get to make their point clear. ISPs can't come back and say "Look, netflix doesn't even care about this anymore..." and Neutrality fans can point to netflix and say "Look, even netflix agrees that if they weren't already a Megacorp, they would be harmed by a lack of net neutrality just like any future startups will be".
Bottles.
If they're willing to admit they were vulnerable back in the day and that this affects smaller people, why aren't they remembering how things used to be? For that matter, why aren't they fighting to lessen their burdens? Odds are, they're paying for exclusivity and I don't understand however that can be a good thing for them.
They are just being honest. There is nothing inherently wrong with a large company using its size to get a better deal.
My issue is with the underlying thought process at work. This time it's a better deal. What about next time? It's a slippery slope to encourage that type of behavior because at some point, they'll use it against you/us.
I've been on the fence regarding keeping my NF account. Thanks for making my decision easy, Mr. Hastings.
The reason Netflix would be against net neutrality is the same reasons corporations frequently push for regulations that make it harder to do business within their own markets. Once you've established yourself as the lead you want to inhibit new competition and by creating barriers of entry (ie what not having net neutrality does) you keep the competition out of your market (which now requires significant funds and size to achieve- something you won't have as an entrant to a market generally speaking).
Yep. If they kept it up, an investigation by someone neutral would show that Netflix was the bad guy in all of this. They chose shitty Tier1 ISPs for a reason and it had nothing to with providing a good experience for their customers.
Netflix appears to have removed a segment from a 1996 episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy that attributes biological sex to chromosomes.
http://www.independent.co.uk/a...
I can see how they might think that, but coordinated action among the few big ISPs in the US could convince them to think differently...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Everyone complains about the Slashdot editors, but nobody Reads TFA to find out whether the summary is misleading. Yeah, I know, nobody RTFA, but seriously, people: you're getting yourselves enraged over a half-truth here.
"Hey, we're more important, so dump that company or you'll loose your contracts with us." "We're big now, so let's pump up the price and line our wallets." "Who cares about workplace morale? That's the stuff for lesser companies." "Just dump it in the stream, we'll buy off the regulators because we can now." "Yeah, that's a nice thing you got going there, be a shame if something were to happen to it." - Every CEO ever.
Of course all Capitalists are giant psychopaths hell bent on screwing up everyone and everything if there's a buck to be made doing it, so I have no idea why I bother, but "It's just good business" is not an excuse for your actions. It's acknowledgement of the harm your actions produce and blatant disregard for anyone but yourself.
In many instances, I wish we could just shoot these people. They produce more harm than good.
If Netflix was now pushing to abolish net neutrality in order to use its size to keep new competitors away, that I would have a moral problem with. This just isn't that objectionable.
The rule being so hotly debated was only introduced in 2015. It did not exist 10 years ago — if Netflix rose despite this "critical" rule being absent, so can others...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
.. and their position... so they are against it.. time to unsubscribe from net flicks and go back to torrents..
I really hope that smaller streaming services survive an era without net neutrality. We assume that Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and other big players will have the ability to negotiate with the main ISPs and work something out and perhaps raise our rates in the process.
But if streaming HD anime from Crunchyroll is no longer feasible then does that mean the businesses go away and their services disappear or are subsumed by larger streaming services? I use that as an example as it is somewhat of a fringe service, watching sub-only Anime isn't exactly mainstream. Having a business with a small but rabid fan base seems to work for Crunchyroll.
End users are really the ones who will will screwed on both choice and price.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
But when 'we the people' are honest, and reveal our COLLECTIVE OPINION is for net neutrality... we don't get the deals we want.
So do you see how it's one-sided?
Honesty yes, but that does not make it respectable. An rapist can tell you they're going to tear you up... does not mean you should appreciate it.
This is a corporation turning a blind eye to the concerns of people who pay them. Not that they're a charity but when net neutrality dies- prices will increase & their business will suffer. Netflix's influence with B2B may be strong, but their relationship with 'the people' is now revealed. And will degrade to 'another expensive ala-cart addon' meaning they will be up for consideration vs. other bills like any common expenditure. They used to be invaluable. *Used to be*
This is the best we could have hoped for, short of Netflix dedicating a lot of resources to fight this. He comes right out and says that killing Net Neutrality hurts small players and favors large companies. This is exactly what it does, and it certainly helps to have someone in his position spell it out in such plain language.
They are just being honest. There is nothing inherently wrong with a large company using its size to get a better deal.
My issue is with the underlying thought process at work. This time it's a better deal. What about next time? It's a slippery slope to encourage that type of behavior because at some point, they'll use it against you/us.
A better deal by itself is not a bad thing, well, until it is. There comes a point when size allows you to distort the market enough that competition is effectively impossible. Now one might argue, but then the stuff is really cheap. This is not necessarily true, since that much power can also lead to regulations and laws that are only really feasible for the big company to obey.
Now it could be argued that the regulations and such, particularly if they are tailored to help that company are the real problem, but it is not everything. For instance netflix might get a great deal from t-mobile or whatever where their traffic, when suitably configured is free. Is that fair to every other video service that didn't get that deal? To be fair to t-mobile, I don't think they restrict to netflix. Some cable companies no doubt favor their own content.
Things need to be generic and open to all, at least within reason. We shouldn't have netflix caching boxes, we should have generic boxes that cache a variety of streaming in data centers. There should be no special deals to treat netflix better than other carriers. The carrier should instead implement the needed infrastructure so any equipped provider can use it.
Of course with something like netflix security of their videos can be important, but we should be able to in this day and age auto scale and deploy virtual machines. Some kind of code signing and security model might be required so the netflix VM they upload is known to come from netflix and provide the appropriate security. With something like this, once a video service has enough customers, the systems could handshake and deploy a VM with needed resources.
In short if the design is correct, any random person could make a web site for serving videos and have it automatically scale based on demand. Yes there are lots of details to work out, but I don't see any reason why we need specific deals for certain streaming sources.
Unfortunately the current FCC won't listen even when someone spells out the problem in such a straight forward way. They are convinced that ISPs will provide 'Fast' and 'Faster' lanes and everyone will be treated equally, despite the fact the 'Fast lane' concept immediately starts to discriminate against certain traffic (aka traffic from companies that can't pay for both their connection and their potential customer connections).
I'm just waiting to get my 1 Gigabit connection that averages 100k to any site that hasn't paid the cable company carriage fee.
There are competitors to Netflix. If net neutrality goes away, many of those competitors can't even get their foot in the door. Under US law, Netflix, as a publicly traded company, MUST act in a way that provides best profit for its shareholders. They walk a fine line in advocating for net neutrality when it is actually against their fiduciary duty to oppose it. It doesn't surprise me that the volume of their defense decreases as their exposure to the problem decreases.
The requirement to always serve profit is a weird requirement in our laws that has pros/cons. That's why I like the surge of "public-benefit corporations" recently, which are founded with specific principles in their by-laws that are allowed to trump profits. Because they're in the by-laws when the company goes public, people buying the stock know that they may get lower returns because the company has a higher goal to serve.
Hastings said they would benefit from no net neutrality. The fact that they are still supporting net neutrality -- just in a quieter voice -- is actually laudable.
I'll give them a pass on net neutrality, as it's really not their fight. What they need to be fighting is regional content deals. I am so sick of having Netflix spastically fail if I'm using a VPN.
You're misreading it. The message is to their shareholders, saying "don't worry, this won't affect us financially", because it looks like this administration is going to get rid of net neutrality and they don't want it to affect their stock price.
One of the fundamental tenets of the socialist manifesto is that children are not the ward of their parents, but rather of the State, and that parents are merely guardians over children on behalf of the State.
This is becoming more and more of a reality everywhere, including in the United States, where just over the last 50 years, parents have basically been stripped by the courts of all of their parental rights. The State (via the school system) can now punish your child for activities they do at home, and (via other government offices) can take them away from you on a whim if they think that you might have done something wrong, like discipline them, or yell at them, or make them feel bad, or even make them do chores or clean their room.
I got my kids out of public school when I got "the letter." "It has come to our attention..." My kid had brought two apples to school in his lunch, which violated strict school lunch guidelines. Mind you, this wasn't for any reason related to nutrition. It simply meant he had two pieces of fruit while other kids only had one. This was fundamentally unfair, and was basically my kid showing off his "white privilege" by having "excess" compared to other kids.
They were in private school for a year until it was shut down by the State after the public school superintendent filed an "anonymous" complaint about safety issues at the private school (that "anonymous" complaint was later outed). Building inspectors descended on the school and found a small handful of minor code violations and revoked all the permits.
This is how socialism and gestapo tactics work, folks. The EU and the US are merely a few decades behind the Bolivarian Socialist Republics in their level of failure and corruption. But, it's coming. Make no mistake.
Formerly a customer for almost 10 years, I just recently closed my account due to their new policy of using Google's "SafetyNet," removing Netflix from the list of apps I'm able to run.
Primary battles indeed.
Anyone else want my money?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
No, people will be incentivized to seek less shitty carrier all that more and netflix will throw their weight as a counter.
This is because both titans use their customers as ammution, and netflix simply got more. If comcast depeers Netflix (and amazon, for that matter), too many people who *do* have a choice of ISP will switch away from comcast at this point making such a step extremely risk for comcast.
here in spain they make a press release every couple of months stating with Service Providers are working faster with netflix and stating which one is slower and bad mouthing it... but apparently they have no problem with it
ahhh sweet contradictions
Well, there sometimes *is* something wrong, which is why we have anti-trust laws, and why we need net neutrality. But if the government says that ISPs are allowed act like feudal barons, then using your size is what you have to do.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And this is the problem with the natural monopoly that has developed, and the reason why Net Neutrality is needed. Most people in the United States don't have a choice of ISP. They couldn't vote with their wallets if they wanted to, except to opt out of the internet entirely.
I wont support this company anymore, time to dump netflix
This is because both titans use their customers as ammution, and netflix simply got more. If comcast depeers Netflix
No problem; They can profile their customers and roll the rate-limits out gradually in concert with other providers, concentrating on customers outside of DSL range first. MOST cable internet users don't have a reasonable alternative.
...what happens in the USA, while important, isn't the end of the world for them. The US hasn't been much of a leader lately, and other countries are starting to go their own way and caring less and less what the US is doing.
Yes, Netflix does have a lot of US-made content obviously...but the creators of said content won't turn down the chance to make some money, and Netflix offers a global platform to allow that (even with geo-fencing).
So, yes, this will sting them in the US, but not the rest of the world. I wouldn't care too much either were I in his shoes. Sometimes a fucking stupid idea just needs to prove itself stupid (i.e. the US and it's Net Neutrality brain fart).
This is because both titans use their customers as ammution, and netflix simply got more. If comcast depeers Netflix
No problem; They can profile their customers and roll the rate-limits out gradually in concert with other providers, concentrating on customers outside of DSL range first. MOST cable internet users don't have a reasonable alternative.
The problem with cat and mouse like this (and when titans clash) is that the effect of throttling netflix merely doesn't affect netflix. You have to throttle all - Google, Amazon and Microsoft ASes NetFlix routinely uses for fronting (they do that both defensively, mostly in US, and offensively, often in europe). Whereas land carriers would have to amass unfathomable cooperation between themselves to pull off the same effect.
Throttling netflix basically means making dozen of mainstream internet services unusuable at this point, because yes, netflix can afford it. People would resort to shitty DSL instead of cable, if AT&T jumped at the opportunity of comcast fucking shit up like this.
tl;dr: Content provider monopolies cooperate much better than last-mile monopolies, in practice.
Exactly
Yeah Free Speech isn't important to me. I can say whatever I want. Sufferage isn't important to me I can vote for whomever I want. Right to freely assemble isn't important to me I can hang with my friends whenever and wherever I want. Right to proper representation isn't important to me i can afford my own lawyers.
When we talk about corporations "being evil" this is what we're talking about. This right here is Netflix showing us blatantly that we can't trust them to do anything that isn't outside their specific personal interest. They have the money and mindshare to be the least affected by changes in net neutrality. They know the public would clamor. The only thing that changes to net neutrality does is ruin the chances of anyone else to become a competitor to Netflix because they won't have that. It makes it harder for anything that isn't Netflix or YouTube or HBO Go or maybe Crunchyroll to get the "deals" that would be necessary to be viable alternatives. They're instituting grandfather clauses in the internet. Either you were popular before net neutrality died or you get backing from Rubert Murdoch or you just suffer.
Just another second banana
No but there is a problem with changing the way the internet works so only large companies can use their size to get better deals. Netflix using their size to get TV shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine over say Crackle is one thing. Netflix using their size to not care that websites like Crackle are downspun and now operate at a crawl while they remain unaffected is completely not ok. That would be like if the tallest NBA players didn't care that the NBA instituted a height requirement that didn't affect them. It's a dick move. It's an even bigger dick move to say it so blatantly.
Just another second banana
Netflix already kicks back some of what you pay them to your telecom company. While I can't argue if they want to get larger pipes to your home sooner rather than later, that the telecom companies demand this of Netflix or they will crappify your service violates your contract with your telecom company.
You probably aren't aware they are lying to you when they tell you they will give you a certain bit rate for a certain fee you pay. They actually extort more money from what you pay Netflix or they will activate their lie to you and slow down your Netflix speed.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It'll be their problem when people stop paying for the premium pipe to them.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
If your internet speed is 1Mbps, reducing it by 90% means streaming video goes from "barely possible" to "not really possible".
If your internet speed is 25Mbps, reducing it by 90% means it goes from "awesome" to "adequate".
10 years ago, "broadband" was 1 Mbps.
10 years from now, "broadband" will probably be over 1Gbps, and even then it will be because most people won't care about (i.e. pay for) speeds in excess of that, not because it will be technically infeasible to provide it.
I predict video streaming (both the protocols and the providers) will care less and less as time goes on.
We will look back at ISPs that throttled instead of expanding capacity, and laugh about how clueless they were.
We'll speculate on whether that was responsible for their demise, or whether it was their abysmal customer service.
Yeah, that type of commentary is why people have serious issues with companies throwing their weight around whenever it suits them.
You are saying this because he manipulated you into saying it. That means he wants you to say it, and he genuinely gives a fuck about neutrality, as does his employer because he's speaking for them. He would not intentionally rile people up, "the Netflix of 10 years ago," if he weren't riled up himself.
It's inspiring there is still enough fat on this beast, enough will, enough class, to say when something is clearly wrong even if it doesn't align with stockholder value.
so, bravo, Netflix. Nobody else was in a better position to say the important thing, and you said it.
"where net neutrality is really important is the Netflix of 10 years ago."
Oh just come out and say it: Where network neutrality is really important is the competition to Netflix.
Netflix 10 years ago was the new competition in town.
Now that they're established and no ISP could keep customers without including Netflix they're on the other side of the power struggle. They're on the side which wants things locked down and kept in place with a massive barrier to entry for new competition. And killing off minor alternatives will let them sleep better at night on their huge piles of cash.
The fact that they would keep silent about the importance of network neutrality, even though they'd profit from it's death, paints them as real hypocritical assholes.
You can't use generic caching for the request patterns Netflix sees. They have spent a lot of time customizing their caching, which is not even dynamic in nature, but static, to reduce cache thrashing. Netflix' infrastructure is an optimized single vision of how everything should work. The software is architected to work well with the hardware and networks, the hardware is architected to work well with the software and network, and the networks are architected to work well with the hardware and software.
There is almost nothing reusable about their design, it is highly optimized exactly for their use case.
If you're using a generic dynamic cache, a 100TiB cache would see less than a 50% hit rate with Netflix. While a 100TiB Netflix optimized cache will see in the 80-90% range, and a 10TiB Netflix optimized cache would see about 50%.
Since there is no way to dynamically determine what data to cache, all you can do is statically partition the data by video streaming provider, and give those provided access to how they want to cache the data. Defeats the entire purpose.
They chose shitty Tier1 ISPs for a reason
They primarily use Level 3, which is for the most part, one of the least evil Tier 1 providers. They did use Cogent, but under duress. They had many situations where the ISP refused to peer with Level 3 for Netflix traffic, but would allow Cogent. Cogent is one of the most evil. They abused this relationship by having Netflix being higher priority than many of their other services, so a large degradation of non-Netflix services would cause customers to call and complain. Level 3, on the other hand, kept Netflix traffic mostly separate.
My biggest complaint about Netflix on Level 3 is receiving 40Gb/s microbrusts from non-paced TCP streams that average 8Mb/s. There is virtually zero congestion between my home connection and Netflix via Level 3.
There is though. Government regulations are supposed to keep the free hand fair, according to Adams and Smith, the grandparents of capitalism
You can't use generic caching for the request patterns Netflix sees. They have spent a lot of time customizing their caching, which is not even dynamic in nature, but static, to reduce cache thrashing. Netflix' infrastructure is an optimized single vision of how everything should work. The software is architected to work well with the hardware and networks, the hardware is architected to work well with the software and network, and the networks are architected to work well with the hardware and software.
There is almost nothing reusable about their design, it is highly optimized exactly for their use case.
If you're using a generic dynamic cache, a 100TiB cache would see less than a 50% hit rate with Netflix. While a 100TiB Netflix optimized cache will see in the 80-90% range, and a 10TiB Netflix optimized cache would see about 50%.
Since there is no way to dynamically determine what data to cache, all you can do is statically partition the data by video streaming provider, and give those provided access to how they want to cache the data. Defeats the entire purpose.
I'm not sure I buy that. Caching video is caching video. Sure there has to be tuning, and netflix might have to follow a standard, but there is not something mystical about their bytes than other people's bytes. Oh I don't doubt they optimize things very well. I'm just saying the problem of video caching is a generic one with a generic solution. At any rate, the idea of downloading a custom VM that runs on a native server farm also works. As far as determining what data gets cached, you could just use netflix's algorithm, or well any algorithm that determines what is most frequently used. I personally think you could possibly divide all the video into say 16MB chunks. That way a netflix node can fetch data from multiple other netflix nodes to serve a customer by searching for a hash. Then again, for all I know, they may already do that.
Why are you all railing on Netflix saying this?
It's the companies that sneak around and use "quiet" lobbyists and backroom deals that you have to worry about!
Netflix just publically said that the "rules benefit big corp"!
In the past, I've heard rumors of Netflix paying off the larger ISP to stop accidentally slowing down Netflix (while net neutrality was supposedly in effect) which seems to be supported by better performance by running Netflix Traffic through a VPN . If this is true, then removing Net Neutrality doesn't really effect Netflix as nothing has changed for them.
Caching video is caching video
Said very simplistically. Unless you plan to cache their entire 1PiB+ catalog, you are going to need to make sure your caching strategy has enough storage to be useful. Let say you need 100Gb/s of Netflix bandwidth, and you want to reduce that by 80%. You will need 80Gb/s of bandwidth, plus 100TiB of storage per server. One of the newest Netflix server can handle nearly 80Gb/s, but they're SSD and don't have 100TiB of storage. Lets say you have their 100TiB server but it can only handle 20Gb/s. Now you need 4 of these, which means 400TiB of storage.
But you mentioned a VM an ISP could get. Now each server can only handle 10Gb/s, so now you need 8 servers, each with 100TiB of storage. Are you starting to see the issue? Netflix is pushing the boundary of IO. Of course there are other ways this problem could be solved, and it could be standardized, but that requires the entire video stream industry to accept a standard and architecture everything to work with that standard. Talking many years of work just to break even with what we have today. but now everyone is tied to a standard and it makes it difficult to innovate how to architect the caching systems, which are in constant flux as new designs are constantly being tested and tweaked.
You have two choices. 1) Throw money at the problem by using generic services 2) Use highly customized designs that are 10x+ more efficient, but no sharing A third pseudo-option is to make the problem mature more quickly by throwing R&D money at it with the intention of creating a standard that will scale and be useful for the next N years where N is a useful amount of time to invest into a standard.