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.
I can't speak to k8s but there are reasons you need clusters to handle absurd amounts of data with high uptime and high networking performance.
The reason the streamers are creating their own content is licensing breakdowns and copyright law. I don't know why everyone thinks they can out Netflix the Netflix streaming service, but they also think they'll make more money trying to do it. It's like Amazon deciding to somehow make their delivery system better than UPS. Or cheaper.
I think it either calls into question the supposed economies of scale and core business competency theories or they're not doing it to save money / make money at all.
I'm not here to shoot down your comment in response, but you are confusing a few different things here. My point was just to demonstrate how the actual cost for streaming from a provider when you throw all the extra junk they do on top of it. You can have very reliable, distributed systems without all that mess, they just choose not to go that route. Selling a user subscription is just the beginning down a rabbit hole of upsells, price hikes, content lures, marketing gimmicks, data capture and sale programs, Ads (for a service you already pay for in most cases)...it's expansive. Each one of those things has a team behind it making decent money.
If they just wanted to stream things they could with much less cost and effort, AND make money doing it. It's been done before. They all just choose to go the route of squeezing their audience for every last ounce of possible monetization they can, which costs a ton of money.
Do you really think that k8s, which is free (unless you buy a support contract) is less easy to manage at that scale than, what - a bunch of VMs with Docker installed? PHP and a NAS? Is that REALLY the cost sink you think it is?
Brother, what works in your homelab will NOT survive Netflix traffic levels.
And streamers are raising prices to get rich. Not because “k8s hard” lol
Hey, friend. No need to get mad. I've worked on these exact systems I'm describing for years, which is how I know these things. They suck. It's not about k8s itself, you're focused on the wrong part of what I'm saying.
You want to just stream files to people cheaply and quickly, these companies don't do that anymore, and that's the choice these companies have made. They'd rather scale their engineering resources to the microservices that nickle and dime the shit out of everyone. That's just the facts.
Ok but marketing teams and micro transactions teams to get rich have fuck all to do with k8s or clusters to run lots of data quickly over the network.
Maybe you know some magic way to provide high availability for petabytes of data pushed at hundreds of Gigabits per second to millions of simultaneous connections. But I don't. And I work with large data volumes for research that still are a fraction of Netflix data and throughput and we've hit the limit of single high performance storage devices necessitating a ceph cluster for storage and availability.
You're just making my point.
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.
Remember when the music industry got people on board by offering single songs for $0.99?
Remember when it was .99 for a 15 second midi ringtone?
Worked for the most part.
Sounds like you could save them buckets of money by redesigning their whole backend. They'd probably pay you idiot money to do so, in terms of seven figures per year at least for the cost and performance enhancements you seem to think are easily achievable.
So why aren't you doing that?
Microservices by Krazam