As someone at a small ISP, this being public was super helpful for us. Caching Netflix is (I think) better for us than it is for Netflix. We saved a ton of bandwidth during peak hours by getting an OCA in our network.

We are too small for Netflix to ever reach out to us, so this was perfect.

The Open Connect program is maybe 10 years old. Is there anything new here?

I remember Comcast whining about their transit traffic getting saturated by Netflix during the first big Net Neutrality fight. Open Connect solved their problems for the price of electricity to run the box. That wouldn't allow Comcast to hold their customers hostage from Netflix though.

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?

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

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

This is spot on. This is basically how Netflix gets free colocation. Netflix's monopoly is what allows them to do this. ISPs would laugh if anyone else wanted free hosting of their edge equipment, but because Netflix is such a burden on ISPs, they're able to strongarm ISPs into providing free hosting of Open Connect appliances.

It's not unusual to do this. Cloudflare has an open peering interface: https://www.cloudflare.com/partners/peering-portal/

I too find it surprising but only for competitive reasons: do you want Disney/Hulu and HBO etc to know how you do it?

It's not really something netflix even came up with. I know I saw Akamai boxes in ISP datacenters way before netflix got into streaming

Most CDN operators do this, including apple which also has a public website about it - https://cache.edge.apple

That is true. I didn't think that they were doing it was the trade secret but the way they were doing it might be, unless that is pretty standardized too. I don't really know.

The fact that they have and deploy boxes isn't the secret. It's the hardware configuration and software integration which is the sauce.