The Video-Industry behaves just like the Music-Industry. They constantly throw dirt at the wall and look for what is sticking to it. If they find something that sticks, they throw further dirt at this point until the whole blob falls down and they start over. The saw what sticks to customers when it comes to price-hikes and now throw everything after this to see how long it will stick. Vote with your wallet.
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.
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?