
Open Connect - tosh
https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
======
lifeisstillgood
Reminds one of the 90s and Akamai

It's a good move for netflix because

\- side step net neutrality rules. If it's likely a tier one carrier will
screw over your traffic, just store the important stuff with the tier two
carriers...

\- AWS is pricey what we way you look at it, and network costs can only go up.
Amazon is a prime (!) competitor for streaming and it's a bad idea to put all
your eggs in your competitors basket

\- Disney is coming over the hill. They have great content - i mean insanely
great. But I bet Disney sucks rocks at hiring network SREs. They will get
there eventually but if you want a huge differentiator between you and the
House of Mouse, being the one without a spinning egg timer is pretty good -
especially as there is no chance you can match their content.

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mosselman
What Disney content are you referring to? In my mind Disney has Star Wars and
movies for children. The only great thing that comes to mind is Pixar, but I
am not going to pay monthly for two handfuls of movies. But seeing as you are
so enthusiastic about their content, it must be my ignorance.

So, again and from a place of interest, what content are you referring to?

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lifeisstillgood
I am sorry that you don't like their content, but for what, 95 years Disney
has produced decade after decade films that are popular, profitable and proven
to be rewatched (and re-paid) decade after decade - films that were made 80
years ago are still bringing in millions - that's what you want for a steaming
service.

~~~
mosselman
I didn't say I don't like their content. I am saying that I wouldn't pay every
month to have the option to look at their content. Will you be watching Toy
Story and Finding Nemo 4 times a month? I'd rather buy those on a disc (which
I did) and pop them in every now and then.

Better yet, sometimes cinemas replay those classics so you can enjoy the full
experience. I'd rather pay to go look at that.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I'm not convinced the economics work out that well. Rough guess, Disney now
has call it 60 top flight movies, from Snow White to Star Wars (top flight as
in have been either box office smashes and/or perennial money makers).

If I could buy all the DVDs (I'm not sure I could) I would be paying 15 quid a
shot - that's 900 pounds. At 9 quid a month subscription that's 8 and a half
years before I break even.

I am fairly sure I lost most of the DVDs I had 9 years ago in our last house
move.

Yes it is likely to be bad economics, but it's not _that_ bad.

Edit: I wanted to check my 60 movie count and I think I am under estimating -
(1) lists 57 "Classic Animated Movies" \- and some are obscure but I would lay
good money that most people you know have seen at least 40 - and that does not
include any Pixar (20 movies?) Marvel or Star Wars (must be 30 by now).

A family (and yes that's the target audience) could have a Movie Bight once a
week for ten years on this subscription.

I guess only time and competition will tell

1) [https://reelrundown.com/animation/all-50-disney-classics-
mov...](https://reelrundown.com/animation/all-50-disney-classics-movies)

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jonhohle
It would be nice/interesting to have a Netflix appliance locally in the home
network which cached content that was expected to be viewed (next episode of a
series, suggestions, promoted shows) along with neighborhood peering to keep
as much of the traffic along the edge as possible (i'm not sure where ISPs
measure bandwidth if you are connected to another node connected to the same
local hub).

OCA seems like a great model for static content, but I wonder if it supports
live streaming content as well. When I spoke with Limelight several years ago,
they had a reasonably nice model for fanning out streams hierarchically so a
single feed could be fanned out very widely late at the last mile.

~~~
wmf
Upstream traffic from the home (especially in DOCSIS) causes more congestion
than downstream traffic from a CDN so CDNs really are better than P2P today.

~~~
bronco21016
What is it about the upstream that causes more congestion? And as you say
"especially in DOCSIS"?

I'm not aware of anything with DOCSIS that requires the up-speed to be so low.
It's just a matter of the cable ISPs not using as many channels for up-speed
because on average a residential connection doesn't _NEED_ a ton of up-speed.

Now if they're just not building out their networks to have a lot of up-speed
bandwidth at the node level then that's another discussion.

It really seems to me that much of this content is likely consumed by many
households within a node. It does seem kinda foolish that it's streamed
multiple times to multiple residences within a neighborhood when the content
could easily live somewhere on that node. I guess it just comes down to what
is cheaper? Bandwidth or storage? Seems they're deciding it's bandwidth which
makes one question why we need data caps on residential broadband.

~~~
wmf
Due to the frequency split there are fewer upstream channels available and
changing that would require replacing all the filters. Downstream bandwidth
inside the ISP is definitely cheaper than anything.

~~~
bronco21016
But my point still stands. That was a design decision. There is nothing
technically stopping them from changing it if they felt they could ease the
strain on their downstream bandwidth by using more localized caching and even
P2P schemes.

In the end it just further highlights that downstream bandwidth is cheap if
they don’t mind sending 20 copies of Stranger Things in 4K down the pipe to a
single node covering a neighborhood. So why the data caps?

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dajonker
This is probably one of the reasons why Netflix is so much more stable and
reliable than pretty much every other streaming service that I've used more
than a couple of times.

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thinkingkong
Oddly enough this strategy has been done before. Akamai did the same thing
back in the day. ISPs were getting hammered with traffic so Akamai sold edge
caches to the ISPs then also sold the CDN to websites and what passed as a
“content provider” back then. Still super cool.

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antongribok
I had the privilege of partnering with Sanmina a few years ago, and they had
the most innovative designs I've seen to date for storage.

My favorite one was where you could stuff equivalent of 30 2.5" SSDs in 1U.

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saagarjha
I find it strange that this page is publicly available–wouldn't Netflix be the
one reaching out to IXPs to get their content cached?

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kalak451
I suspect that if netflix went to the ISPs to cache their data, the ISPs would
be more than happy to charge them for it like to do with other content
networks. In this case, netflix is assuming that the volume of netflix traffic
at the ISP will drive the ISP to request on network caching. Netflix is happy
to provide this, but is not willing to pay the ISP for the privilege.

Does netflix care about how much traffic they are directly serving vs how much
is hitting caching servers? Are they playing chicken with the ISPs hoping the
ISPs will blink first and put caching servers servers onsite for free?

~~~
CraftThatBlock
This is most likely a win-win senario for both parties.

Netflix can be more stable, and can save on bandwidth in their own DCs.

ISP can save a lot of egress bandwidth by having Netflix inside their
infrastructure.

I would be surprised if any of the parties payed. It's a great strategy to
have the ISPs on board with this

~~~
rstupek
Exactly. It's almost like a peering relationship between providers but in this
instance netflix is not directly connected to the ISP so wouldn't be paying
the ISP for bandwidth used by their customers accessing netflix. It definitely
saves the ISP a lot of bandwidth cost

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ljp_206
Can someone ELI5 this to me? Netflix is providing devices that are designed to
route Netflix traffic or data only through an ISP's network, reducing the
strain on the entire ISP's service?

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idunno246
It’s storage cache they put in your isp so if you and your neighbor watch the
same thing, it only goes the first hop from your house to the isp instead of
all the way to Netflix, which is much cheaper for the isp. This is a fairly
common thing that cdns do

