Cloud Efficiency at Netflix(netflixtechblog.com) |
Cloud Efficiency at Netflix(netflixtechblog.com) |
Has anyone found an easy hack to ensure playback happens in 4k on desktop as well (e.g. url parameter)?
Yes there is. It's called piracy.
Take any movie with dark scenes, and it'll look horrible regardless of 720p vs 4k.
But those are enforced via hardware backed keys.
Sorry for dropping in my personal rant, but it sort of triggered me after looking at the quality of this post. I'm thinking, perhaps they have a culture problem where the focus is "efficiency" as the title implies instead of quality.
They provide a service which at its core is just: audio, video, and text. They fail at one of three.
This apparently doesn't warrant a blog, or any attention at all for a decade now.
It's their core service!
Meh... not exciting enough. Rearranging stuff in their cloud however got someone promoted.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5198106/is-video-stream...
No engineer has ever said this. I miss when engineering blogs were actual engineering. This blog post has been through so much management waffle rewording it no longer adds much to the conversation.
How do they solve it on AWS? Tags, Accounts, something else? Why can't they use cost explorer?
What they built sound nice and feature-rich but also quite complex. I just finished adding a (simplier) feature to the SaaS I am building. It generates individual reports with the list of resources owned by the user, the associated cost and flag for thise which are likely unused.
I will post of Show HN soon, but if you are interested in cloud efficiency, I would love you feedback! https://li10.com
There are likely a few factors at play here, including the fact that Netflix decided to go its own way in this regard ~15y ago.
Though I work at a smaller (but still large), newer company now we still also have our own stuff for this.
For <business reasons> we have in the order of 10^6 SNS topics in one account+region pair. In that account, while in that region, the SNS console is entirely frozen. I suspect they're doing some looped pagination polling in the background and fall over on our degenerate use case.
Edit: I can also back up the other parent comment - tagging still works fine (and I know for a fact the stability and scalability of the tag system is taken more seriously than most things within AWS)
Pirate content and be free
Or buy an apple tv and hook it up to your monitor.
That said, if Netflix decided 4K was the segmentation for the higher plan and gave 4 screens to the lower plan, that wouldn't suit me personally, but I would prefer the pricing. Honestly the screens concept seems outdated with their anti-password sharing stuff now. Just apply the same WiFi pinning to all viewing and don't limit screens at all.
Recently: "Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529756
It's easy to blow past four with a screen, not necessarily a TV, going in every room.
YouTube do not even supply anything more than SD to PCs for rented or purchased titles.
Amazon lock Dolby Vision behind their ad free supplement. YouTube locks high bittrate 1080p behind YouTube Premium. Paramount lock 4K behind their upper tier. So do Disney.
You are, bluntly, flat wrong here.
> YouTube locks high bittrate 1080p behind YouTube Premium
I'm discounting free tiers. I think it's fine to segment aggressively to get people into paying tiers, but nickle and diming paying users just sucks.
> Paramount lock 4K behind their upper tier. So do Disney.
I've never had either of these, but would be less likely to as a result.
I know 4K streaming is substantially more expensive than 1080p, but honestly the delivery is such a small fraction of the price being paid that it does not need to be associated with an increased cost.