Hundreds of thousands of households worldwide tapped into the Squid Game last month, and viewers may have taken something for granted. Even as other services have struggled to keep their products sturdy under less demanding circumstances, the demand for the dystopian drama that would become its most successful title to date was not.
When we use our favorite streaming services, we often run into various fury-making problems: stuff freezes, controls don't work, or the service crashes entirely. None of these are ideal, but all seem to have become a cost of cord-cutting. Disney Plus crashed its very first day because its software couldn't handle the demand, and then it buckled again under demand for WandaVision. The leadership of the app admits that it is a mess. The Stories feature of the service makes it a kind of streaming service in its own right, and it crashes frequently. It can be difficult to watch streaming.
The guts of a service, the engineering behind the app itself, are the foundation of any streamer's success, and in order to avoid many modern streaming headaches, Netflix has built out an expansive server network called Open Connect. It is the thing that has allowed the service to serve up a far more reliable experience than its competitors, and not to fall behind when it gets a lot of users.
Anyone who wants to improve performance is going to try to put a server as close to the end user as possible.
Dan Rayburn, a media streaming expert, said that Open Connect is something that most people outside of the technical part of the industry underestimates. Over the last 10 years, how many times has the service had a problem?
Not as many as Max.
Gina Haspilaire, the vice president of Open Connect, tells me that Open Connect was created because they knew they needed to build some level of infrastructure technology that would sustain the anticipated traffic. The internet was not built to sustain the level of traffic that would be required globally, and we knew that when we started.
People don't want to sit down to watch a movie and have their app crash. If it was going to maintain a certain level of quality, it would have to build its own distribution system.
Popping the hood on a car.
Open Connect is a network that is specifically built to deliver its TV shows and movies. The program started in 2012 and involves giving internet service providers physical appliances. The appliances store copies of the content in order to create less strain on the networks by eliminating the number of channels that have to pass through to get the content to the user.
Most major streaming services rely on third-party content delivery networks to pass along their videos, which is why the server network of Netflix is unique. Without a system like Open Connect or a third-party CDN in place, a request for content by an ISP has to go through a peering point and then transit four or five other networks until it gets to the origin or the place that holds the content. It is expensive since the content may have to be paid for by the internet service provider.
To avoid the fees and traffic, the company ships copies of its content to its own server. It helps to prevent traffic from getting in the way of network demand.
Open Connect can bring a copy of Bridgerton to the closest point to your internet service provider, so that you don't have to go and transfer it through all these server.
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They are everywhere. The company tells me that it has 17,000 server spread across 158 countries, and that it plans to continue expanding. The company says that it places the server where it has the most members and relationships with the internet service providers.
Law says anyone who wants to improve performance is going to try to put a server as close to the end user as possible. It stops the traffic from going back to an origin if it is put there and served from the last mile network. It is taking a load off the internet and it is taking a load off the peering points.
The service started working with ISPs on deployment when it was first launched. An internal reliability team works with the internet service providers to maintain the server. The benefit to ISPs is that they don't have to fetch their own copies of content.
Law tells me that it is a relief. It is the same principle that every CDN works on. The only difference between the other CDNs and the one at Netflix is that the CDN is dedicated to the content of the company.
While most major third-party CDNs do multiple jobs and manage multiple requests from many companies, the internal CDN of Netflix does only one job: it distributes content. There is a lot of stuff that needs to happen along the way for you to stream a movie or TV show, if a content distributor doesn't have this kind of CDN partnership or server network in place.
America's internet service providers are the reason that the CDN was built.
Since its creation a decade ago, the company says it has invested $1 billion in Open Connect. It is dumping money into the CDN because it is a core part of the business strategy. The whole subscription model is based on what quality of video a user wants.
America's internet infrastructure is broken and fundamentally fractured.
The reason for the creation of a content delivery network is because America's internet service providers are garbage, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Customers don't want an endless buffering screen or degraded quality.
Not every internet service provider allows the hardware in. The AT&T executive who spoke with The Verge confirmed that AT&T still sells optimal network connections to the streamer, rather than having it install physical devices in its data centers. When asked about how this arrangement works with its Open Connect program, the company said that it views its relationships with internet service providers as flexible. The arrangement may be different based on what the internet service provider supports, and the company will find other connection points to bring its titles closer to the viewer.
Why it works.
Regardless of how bad your internet service is, you can still get a good viewing experience with Netflix.
Each of the three copies of each title that is sent to its server has a different level of quality. The system can swap in a lower-bitrate version of the title if your internet suddenly goes down, helping you maintain the stream without interruption.
Haspilaire says that they will adapt the content to the quality of the network. When your network has a blip, your streaming stays constant. When your internet goes out, you won't get buffering from us because we can adjust the version over time.
Why are there three copies? The internet is unreliable as noted by Trendacosta. Your ability to access the internet the way you need to might be affected by network disruptions. Many network problems can be solved through collaboration with ISPs.
Nobody is going to disagree with the system built by the company.
During off-peak hours, the internet traffic that would occur during high-use streaming times are not competing with this content. When it comes to where and what content it puts there, the company says it anticipates what will be popular and sends it to the server.
We are placing content on all of these server around the world, but we are pre- placing it based on what is popular. Haspilaire says that they are able to put it under the correct server because they predict what is popular. We can store 100 percent of our catalog locally based on prime time viewing hours. That eliminates the risk of service disruption.
The videos are shuffled around the server based on what it expects to get the most attention. Open Connect has two types of server, flash and storage, which hold up to 350 terabytes of data. If a title becomes popular, it will be moved onto the flash server.
The company tells me that the OCA is built to be dynamic as demand increases for a show or film because the flash server is designed to serve a larger portion of traffic.
Hundreds of millions of people huddling in their homes and looking for entertaining distraction was a perfect litmus test for this 10-year-old project. The Pandemic tested our infrastructure and technology in a way that it was not built for. Open connect helped against increased demand.
He was a king of streaming.
Open Connect is one of the biggest drivers behind the performance of the service. There are a lot of other moving parts that put the company ahead of its competitors. One example of such an example is the video and audio Encoding initiatives of Netflix. If you want to grow and retain subscribers, you have to have a rock-solid product.
Rayburn says that the biggest thing that is missed in the industry is the fact that the system that is built by Netflix works at scale. If you can deliver good, quality consumer experience at scale, you'll get that number of subs. Nobody has ever had the scale to the level of the company. Nobody has that expertise.
Users have to enjoy the stuff that is built on top of the infrastructure. The consideration that goes into the development of the various features of the service is often overlooked because we don't have to think about them. Improvements to itsUI are constantly being worked on by the company.
We don't assume that one size fits all. Steve Johnson, the vice president of product and studio design at Netflix, says that it doesn't mean that a product for the western audience works in Korea or Japan. We have to think about the differences in those countries.
It is possible that major streamers will look to the infrastructure and top-to- bottom business strategy of the company for guidance. Maybe that will fix the universal nightmare of streaming content.
