Netflix's Secrets to Success: Six Cell Towers, Dubbing and More (variety.com)

Variety gets access to the people at Netflix who take care of the tech: Netflix has its own cell towers. Netflix wants to test its app running on mobile devices under a variety of conditions available around the world, so the company decided to bring the operating equipment of six cell towers to its Los Gatos offices. "Minus the towers," quipped Scott Ryder, the company's director of mobile streaming. The cell tower equipment is housed in the company's mobile device lab, where they are joined by a number of cabinets that look like fancy Netflix-themed fridges, but in reality are Faraday cage-like boxes to suppress any outside interference, and also make sure that those experimental cell towers don't mess up phone reception on the rest of the campus. Each of these boxes can house dozens of devices, and emulate certain mobile or Wi-Fi conditions. "We can make a box look like India, we can make a box look like the Netherlands," Ryder said. Altogether, Netflix runs over 125,000 tests in its mobile lab every single day.[...]

Netflix just re-encoded its entire catalog, again. To optimize videos for mobile viewing, Netflix recently re-encoded its entire catalog on a per-scene basis. "We segment the videos into shots, we analyze the video per shot," said the company's director of video algorithms Anne Aaron. Now, an action scene in a show may stream at a higher bit rate than a scene featuring a slow monologue -- and users with limited bandwidth are set to save a lot of data. A few years back, 4 GB of mobile data would get you just about 10 hours of Netflix video, said Aaron. Now, members can watch up to 26 hours while consuming the same amount of data. Netflix previously re-encoded its entire catalog on a per-title basis, which already allowed it to stream animated shows at much lower bitrates than action movies with a lot of visual complexity. The next step for the company will be to adopt AV1, an advanced video codec developed by an alliance of companies that also includes Apple, Amazon, and Google. Aaron said Netflix could start streaming in AV1 before the end of this year, with Chrome browsers likely being first in line to receive AV1 streams.

Comments

Re:AV1?

[guruevi]

The problem is that only high-end devices are just getting H.265 support and even then it's pretty spotty as to actual implementation and performance. If the industry keeps coming out with new codecs at this rate, we are going to have to adapt our chips to be more flexible, perhaps even programmable in the hardware decoder area which brings with it a whole slew of issues, both physical (heat, size and cost) as well as in software (does every piece of software get to upload its own decoders, if so, how, what if we need more or different versions).

H.264 and VP8 is easy to find these days, VP9 and H265 is slowly but surely coming, releasing a brand new codec today will take 5 years to get it in the majority of high-end chip fabs and another 5-or-so years to go mainstream with at least 15-20y more years of having to have both available.