this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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In all seriousness, streaming could be profitable for these companies if they just didn't layer bullshit on top of bullshit on the backend. Dozens of k8s clusters, hundreds of stupid microservices, and engineering team to manage it all...it's insane. This is BEFORE all the idiotic choices they make greenlighting new content that costs a ton of money.
If they just wanted to make money on streaming, they could without the extra bullshit, and just charged people for sending content across the wire. This is just not what any of these companies are doing anymore, and we're paying for it.
So you are tryimg to tell me that the operating costs of the CDN are the big reason they need money, not the fact they throw billions at crappy content productions? And that the little performance you would gain by stripping k8s would make a difference, especially wrt the huge additional administration effort and lack of automation this would introduce? Nah man, sorry but you are wrong here in many ways.
No, I'm saying that Netflix WAS a streaming service only, and then created a scenario where they constantly need more money and can't support their own business practices by incurring an insane amount of debt by complicating the platform and spending a small country's GDP in creating new content. They WERE making money, and then went off the rails and now need to constantly raise prices.
I'm not sure what you mean about the CDN, but aside from Amazon and Google, none of these streaming services are caching at edge for the actual video libraries. Instead, Netflix specifically has tiered replication of their entire library in various AZs around the world tailored to each regions most popular content. You can see this at work by watching your network traffic hit different endpoints for something like a popular new title versus an old and rarely watched title.
Netflix is still making money, and the cost of their tech is utterly dwarfed by the cost of creating and licensing content, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Netflix is $13b in debt. That is THIRTEEN BILLION USD IN DEBT. It's a fact. The streaming arm of the company was the only profitable part for about two years when they first started it.
As far as their tech goes, and you can Google if you want, they would make more money per customer if they dropped the other bullshit, and just focused on streaming content.