You might be wondering that there are many streaming platforms and only one caught our eye. Why? Well, there is one difference between Netflix and other streaming platforms. It doesn't just want to be a content creator or a tech company; it wants to be both. The latter has been Netflix's core advantage up until now, & it continues innovating to keep its momentum going. We have tried to uncover some of the lesser known advanced technologies used by Netflix.
First things first, a little background :
Netflix was founded in 1997 as a movie rental service that shipped DVDs to customers by mail. In 2007, Netflix launched the product we’re most familiar with today: streaming movies and TV over the Internet.
In 2001, Netflix had fewer than half a million subscribers. Today, it has 203.66 million paying members. And the company’s market cap is well over $200 billion.
Let us see the reasons behind this jaw-dropping numbers!
Ever saw Netflix crashing?
Remember how whatsapp, facebook, all went down a few days back due to a little technical glitch? Remember how many times, the apps or websites on your phone crash due to “heavy traffic” or “server congestion”? If JEE results are out, their official website will most likely crash within half an hour as lacs of students rush to check their results. So, how does Netflix take care of it that its users binge watch without any such disturbance? How does it ensure that its 203.66 million subscribers keep watching their favorite shows without buffering or without crashing the apps?
Enters a technology called Dynamic Optimizer. This technology just produces best possible picture using smallest amount of bandwidth. An hour-long movie, captured in 6K resolution, weighs in at 293GB of raw, unedited footage. That amounts to about 750 Mbps of data, which would basically kill your internet plan if you streamed it before it was compressed. Using this new encoding framework, that video shrinks to a mere 270 Kbps. In the real world, that means that if you have a 1GB data plan of Jio, you can watch 6.5 hours of Netflix per day, up from just 2.5 hours before. Pretty cool, right?
Thumbnails are watching you!
Netflix has much more layers of customization that you can imagine. One such example is customized thumbnails - Yep you heard that right!
A typical viewer spends a mere 1.8 seconds considering each title and it only takes 9 seconds to get her attention before she moves on. Netflix puts in a lot of resources to choose each thumbnail that we see on the screen. With a selection process called Aesthetic Visual Analysis(AVA) and multiple rounds of A/B testing, thumbnails change regularly based on our engagement with previous titles.
For example, I'm a stand-up comedy fan and have binged all Kevin Hart’s specials, so when I search ‘Good Will Hunting’, I get a thumbnail with Robin Williams, comedian and one of the movie’s main characters. Are you more into romance? You may get cover art for ‘Good Will Hunting’ with the two leads kissing.
Hyper-personalizing experiences (or rather calculating them) has become a huge USP for Netflix.
Taking the load off the internet:
Data travels through internet in form of packets – we all know that (almost!). But physically, it travels through cables laid under the oceans for thousands of kilometers. Yes!
Fun/Gyan : Go to Youtube and type “How internet works?” to get some mindblowing revelations about internet!
But Netflix does not depend solely on these underwater cables! And in the coming future, it will probably not need them at all! How?
Through their Open Connect Boxes - specialized video servers that the company installs at ISP locations around the world to reduce the latency involved in delivering video content by bringing it physically closer to the user. This is something Netflix first spoke about in 2016 and since then the number of Open Connect boxes around the world has surged.
Purchased, built and installed at local ISPs by Netflix, the company took load off the internet because it doesn't have to go through the whole Internet to get to somebody's home. It's a big advantage and thus the Netflix consumer is going to get higher quality, a better picture, less latency. The company has started installing Open Connect boxes in India along with other countries, and will be adding more in the coming months as well.
Fig. An Open Connect Box
These are some of the cool technologies that makes this streaming giant No.16 on Fortune’s list of the World’s Most Admired Companies in 2020, with revenue of over $25 billion.
We can safely conclude that Netflix has revolutionized the entertainment industry in its over two-decade-long existence. It has introduced viewers to varied content in over 190 countries and has also managed to pick up a few Oscars and Emmys along the way. The stellar growth and the lightening speed with which the company is growing, we know there are many more revolutions to come in the tech space of streaming industry.
As its CEO Reed Hastings believe, “Companies rarely die from moving too fast and they frequently die from moving too slowly!”
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By: Anmol Gupta | Isha Garg