How did so many streaming services replicate Netflix?
Netflix was supposed to have a giant technological moat thanks to partnerships with various ISPs across the globe where they placed their openconnect appliances as well as IP in streaming, DRM tech itself. How did services like Disney+ replicate this so quickly? Did Netflix shoot itself in the foot by openly writing about their approach in their tech blogs?
They didn't need to replicate it. Infrastructure improvements over the years have made the problems Netflix solved irrelevant.
Yep Netflix operated in a time where 1-10 mbps was considered good. A lot of “problems” we face now will be trivial in the future.
Disney bought MLB Advanced Media, which has been streaming video for 20 years.
Exactly. Heard a coworker doing an interview and telling them about how MLB advanced media had its own infra in the same way Netflix did, just unlike Netflix they used it to charge other companies to support their streaming services under the hood for a decade until Disney came along.
They didn’t build a CDN from scratch
Did Disney use fastly?
We did eventually!
Netflix is the only profitable streaming service. One big reason is that the cost per stream is best in the class. Disney et al. will struggle to match the efficiency.
Is that a metric for cost it takes to service each user? I thought those were mostly fixed costs.
Bandwidth cost can be linear with the peak number of concurrent streams if you don't own your CDN. And it can cost many billions at Netflix scale
Aws now makes it easy
Open Connect's purpose had more to do with reducing cost of delivery than improving quality of service. You can build a high quality streaming service using Akamai, Fastly, CloudFront and other CDNs, it's just gonna cost you a lot more $$$ in the long run. As far as the streaming tech IP goes, Netflix never had a huge advantage there. They made some great improvements in video quality measurements and tuning, but the basic building blocks of streaming - codecs, formats, protocols, DRM, etc - have all been standardized by the industry over the past 15 years.
It's easy to create a search engine. There's only one Google. For an industry with intense competitions, the cost efficiency is enough to make all the difference. So far only Netflix is a profitable streaming service. Even Paramount and WBD may not make it.
The fact that Netflix is profitable has little to do with their tech stack cost. The cost of original content development is much higher than cost of delivering the content.
“Our” lol
Tech backbone for streaming being ubiquitous and Disney has good content already.