It makes some sense if it's the user onboarding that's failing. That's the one part that should see much less traffic in normal operation.

This makes more sense to me then all the talk about CDN's. CDN's don't solve all problems.

That's actually the hard part. Video streaming is easy, and done with CDNs.

Sure, handing over giant checks to Akamai is easy, but it becomes a lot harder if you do the CDN part yourself. Like all the really big streaming video providers do, because otherwise they wouldn't be competitive at scale.

Well, it's not "easy", at Netflix scale. Lots of Netflix traffic is done via local caching servers at ISPs as CDN delivery isn't reliable enough. Minimising playback latency is really, really hard and NF do very well here. Robust geofiltering in those scenarios is hard if you're trying to check the video essence and not just the license.

Having said that, there are a lot of reasonably mature solutions in the market to address many of these points, and it doesn't appear that was the issue yesterday.