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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.
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.
How many people will actually be using AV1?
Everyone eventually. AV1 will be the codec of choice for all web video. It outperforms the other options and doesn't have the licensing hassles of H.264 or the licensing mess of H.265. The licensing of H.265 is so bad that even the founder and chairman of MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione, thinks MPEG probably doesn't have a future.
People will encode to H.264 for legacy devices, VP9 for current devices, and encode to AV1 for current desktops and future devices.
The H265 rollout has been slow because its licensing is such a disaster. Why would you be in a rush to ship H265 when you have no idea how much you will have to pay patent holders for the units you are shipping?
AV1 does not have this problem. It's a no-brainer to implement and ship it ASAP. Within two years all new chips will have it.
Soon it will become clear that H265 will see very little usage outside broadcasting. The H265 patent pools will drop any pretense of encouraging broad H265 adoption and focus on extracting maximum revenue from those vendors foolish enough to have shipped H265 in advance of a clear licensing story. As soon as the inevitability aura around H265 dissipates, the non-TV vendors will drop it like a hot potato.
I've heard a mixed bag coming out of Netflix re: developer experience, but one thing I admire is their effort toward a reliable user experience.
From testing everything down to minutiae, to designing things so that failure is simply another regular and expected state to move forward from... most companies do not commit the time/funds to do this sort of thing.
This practical engineering is much cooler to me than Facebook/Google's latest me-too Javascript libraries that iteratively steal the next good established idea from desktop coding and call it innovation.
"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
Video encoders have supported constant quality modes for quite a while that already do this very effectively. I'm guessing they don't do this out of some need for precise control or for hardware compatibility. It's obviously not a wasted effort, but it's unfortunate that Netflix is needing to reinvent the wheel here.