How Netflix Eats the Internet

pacopico writes "Every night, Netflix accounts for about one-third of the downstream Internet traffic in North America, dwarfing all of its major rivals combined. Bloomberg Businessweek has a story detailing the computer science behind the streaming site. It digs into Netflix's heavy use of AWS and its open-source tools like Chaos Kong and Asgard, which the Obama administration apparently used during the campaign. Story seems to suggest that the TV networks will have an awful time mimicking what Netflix has done."

Just like eating an elephant

[Joehonkie]

One byte at a time?

Re:Is Netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

What a stupid comment -- especially for someone highjacking my /. name.

Re:The TV networks have had an awful time adapting

[SJHillman]

If I've learned anything from Sid Meier, it's that spearmen are damned tough bastards to beat when they want to hold their ground.

Netflix used 1/3 of Internet's BW on DVD-by-mail

[billstewart]

Back in the old days, when Netflix worked by mailing physical DVDs, their bandwidth was about 1/3 of the total bandwidth of the Internet. They had a much higher latency (~48 hours), but a huge amount of parallelism and 4GB packet sizes.

Re:I heard other numbers

[Threni]

YouTube spends most of its time saying 'buffering'; something I've never experienced with netflix. That's got to save a lot of bandwidth.

Double entendre

[evilviper]

From TFA:

One of Netflixâ(TM)s mathematicians is known as 10-Foot User Interface Guy because the average person watching the service via TV sits 10 feet away. His job is to arrange the box art of videos in the most appealing way on a big screen. Thereâ(TM)s also Two-Foot Guy, who deals with laptops, and 18-Inch Guy for tablets.

They call me "18-Inch Guy", too... Probably for different reasons.

Re:How many thirds are there?

[Macgrrl]

Maybe Netflix is spamming us with porn via bit torrent?