An informative article on Netflix in Bloomberg BusinessWeek

The Netflix article is a profile of the founder, Reed Hastings, and goes into some detail on their technology and strategy. Some of the points that struck me were:

• In spite of the fact that Netflix and Amazon are direct competitors in the IP video market, Netflix is hosted on Amazon Web Services.
• Netflix streams during the day and analyses data at night. They load servers between 2 and 5 AM local time. Shows they predict will be popular are served from flash storage.
• The master copies of all the shows and movies available to Netflix take up 3.14 petabytes of storage space. Netflix compresses the master files creating more than 100 different versions, each tuned for the varying bandwidth, device, and language needs of its customers. The compressed catalog is about 2.75 petabytes.

Check the article for more on the technology, Hastings and Netflix.

North American downstream traffic

-----

Update 6/18/2013

*Cogent says Verizon is not provisioning capacity to handle Netflix traffic*

From a GigaOm article at http://bit.ly/11XvMzn:

Cogent and Verizon peer to each other at about ten locations and they exchange traffic through several ports. These ports typically send and receive data at speeds of around 10 gigabit per second. When the ports start to fill up (usually at 50 percent of their capacity), the internet companies add more ports. In this case, through, Verizon is allowing the ports that connect to Cogent to get crammed. ”They are allowing the peer connections to degrade,” said Dave Schaffer, chief executive officer of Cogent said in an interview. “Today some of the ports are at 100 percent capacity.”