Fun facts can come from this oddest places, and in this case a Netflix recruiting video has brought with it some cool illustrations of the sheer immensity of the Netflix streaming operation. I’ve detailed some of this kind of stuff before in pieces about Netflix’s recent deals with Disney and Warner Brothers, but this has some cool insight into the behind-the scenes workflow.
The most interesting bit is the elaboration on how each movie is prepped for delivery to the multitude of devices that carry Instant Watch –smartphones, browsers, blu-ray players, tablets, etc– which involves the creation of 120 encodes for each film. That’s comprised of the varying quality levels, sub-title versions, and more.
If you had any doubts that Instant Watch was an immense entity, just remember that they’re serving twice as much video as YouTube every day, represents about a third of ALL US internet traffic at primetime hours, and they host around a petabyte of video on their servers.
You can read more about this kind of stuff in the Sandvine Internet Traffic Report, if reading esoteric reports about data usage in North America is your kind of thing.
via Gizmodo