Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

Re:Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and D... by waffle_ss on Sunday June 17, 2018 @03:02PM (#17333740)

Nobody in here seems to appreciate the networking complexity that Netflix deals with - they are 37% of North America's internet traffic! At that point the network isn't an abstraction that "just works" like most web apps; you have to be aware of physical and business realities that dictate traffic (e.g. negotiate peering agreements, deploy caching/CDN boxes to network POPs, etc.).

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Re:Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and D... by JetSpiegel on Sunday June 17, 2018 @03:25PM (#17333864)

Or you can buy the CDN service from a myriad of companies in the world. It only takes money to get servers and bandwidth in many places.

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Re:Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and D... by petra on Sunday June 17, 2018 @04:03PM (#17334028)

True. But depending on what's you guess on how much it costs for netflix to get a content hour watched by a user(maybe ~$0.1-0.2), streaming costs may become meaningful, and higher streaming costs becomes a strategic disadvantage.

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Re:Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and D... by waffle_ss on Sunday June 17, 2018 @06:24PM (#17334687)

Exactly. Excepting Cloudflare which is free, CDNs are expensive (or at least more expensive than I think people realize).

Netflix says it uses about 3GB of bandwidth per hour for streaming HD-quality video. CloudFront for one will charge you $0.26 for that 3GB-hour. It's pretty easy to see how binge watchers will rack up pretty high CDN/bandwidth bills.

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