This was mentioned the last time a similar thread came up as well. Reputable, large corporations don't tend to work that way. A department will often end up doing their best to provide a service to a competitor of a different department.

I'm pretty sure getting data about # of bytes transferred on a hourly basis from Netflix's instances would be valuable to estimate # of movies viewed. Further subdividing the flow by (src, dst) IP will give a good idea about # of minutes watched per day etc.

The point is that innocent statistics about Netflix's machines gathered for routine "security" and other housekeeping efforts can lawfully give Amazon a lot of information about Netflix.

IMHO, Netflix has needlessly put themselves in a vulnerable position by moving to Amazon.

Netflix doesnt stream off of Amazon and even if they do use cloudfront (which i highly doubt), they have other CDN's (Akamai,Limelight) off which they would stream traffic too. I do not see how it would be possible for Amazon to monitor that network activity and get information about Netflix.

Clients still need to authenticate when they start a stream, amazon could use that information to approximate traffic.

Thanks for the clarification. So the video files are directly hosted by the CDNs? OK, in that case, Amazon can't get insight into Netflix by gathering network statistics.

Google is probably doing the same thing with AdWords.

Google has every bit of information about Groupon and LivingSocial AdWords spending (millions of dollars per month). When Google launches their competitor, Google Offers, they'll know exactly which ads get people to buy deals. Incidentally, Google Offers will work by running offers across Google ad networks.

No question they are thinking about it. I went to a meetup last week in which they explained how moving to the cloud was extremely important to them, and how they transitioned to SimpleDB and Cassandra.

http://www.meetup.com/cloudcomputing/events/16395288/ (link to paper about their experience).

I have both Netflix and Amazon Prime and would probably drop Netflix if Amazon had a better selection. If most users are like me, this means that Netflix has to increase their catalog, which has both technical and licensing implications. On the technical side it's caching and long-tail inefficiencies which will increase their infrastructure costs. If they are still using AWS (the Mercedes Benz of cloud hosting), I'm sure it's because their margins are high. Given their size they could get a much better deal with another provider.

Netflix is in a difficult position I think. Their infrastructure is becoming commoditized, much of their content is also being licensed to their competitors and their delivery mechanism is no longer unique. What's left for them to differentiate themselves from the competition? It seems like their only choice is to pay steeper and steeper prices to get content that nobody else has in order to justify their value to subscribers.

Their recommendation engine is a key strength. I LOVE it.

Second, at <$10/mo, the cost is not high enough to make bother with switching. I would rather pay $10/mo have the best streaming experience than pay $6/mo have a second-rate streaming experience.

I expect Netflix to come out on top in this battle. Obviously, I'm rooting for them (I dislike companies which squeeze competitors through loss leaders).

Why would they rethink it, I wonder? For fear of Amazon spying on them?

I think Amazon is too big to try something funny - because they are big, a dent in their reputation would probably also hit them big. Who would still want to host on AWS if they would let down Netflix?