Eli5: what happens on the server when one selects to watch a movie on Netflix and how the architecture allows 500k other people to watch the same movie almost concurrently?
In: Technology
In addition to what has already been mentioned, Netflix doesn’t put their whole catalog into CDN and cache. They would bankrupt themselves if they tried to do that. The clever part is guessing which films and content to cache where in a way that minimizes latency access the whole system.
Straight statistics helps, but being able to predict which films individuals will want to watch with better accuracy than the overall statistics is how they make money. They improve their bottom line by saving money on storage and bandwidth.
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