Then Netflix moved into the idea of video streaming, where you could stream movies
or TV shows to Internet connected devices.
So rather than having the store where you would need to go for rental or an online
store where they would ship a DVD to your house, and we're talking about the
physical shipment of goods or picking up of goods.
Then they moved into what's called video streaming, and that's probably what you
know them as more recently, if you're subscribing to Netflix, where you can
stream movies or TV shows to Internet connected devices.
So the way it works on your TV, set top box, STB stands for set top box smart
phones. So this is your, in this case we're
talking about a set top box. You basically have the Internet, right
and your, your box or your TV is connected to the internet in some way
through your house. We've looked at the WiFi set up for a
home and this is in a wireless connection on your set up box.
It would be on your Smartphone but your set up box not to be wireless but you're
connected to the Internet somehow. And then the Internet has a connection
back to you. And then somewhere from within the
Internet there's some place this we call these servers or they're data centers and
we a lot of times think of that as the cloud.
And there's there's another chapter in the optional reading on the cloud that we
may have time to look at a little bit in a later lecture.
And then basically, once you send this request to this cloud then the cloud will
stream the service all the way back to you.
So this movie that you want if you're selecting whatever movie this is.
Is contained somewhere in this, server and then the server will, send that movie
back to you in little bits and pieces as you watch it, allowing you to watch the
movie. So they started moving into that, this
whole idea of streaming movies. And that was, really gave them a lot of
remarkable growth. And there's a lot of statistics up to Q1
2011 around March actually. If you look online there's some stats
about Netflix in March, 2011, when they did some tests on the Internet and
packets running from the Internet and so on.
so one of those is that the data increased to 23 million subscribers in
the US and Canada. By March of 2011 and they had from 2008,
they only had 9 million so they basically had almost tripled in size in about three
years which is pretty remarkable. they had also surpassed Comcast so this
time at least they were right up to where Comcast is or up to par, just a little
higher than Comcast in terms of their number of video subscribers.
And so, now you can see Netflix over here had about 22.8 million [UNKNOWN],
millions of subscribers. Comcast, 22.76 is trailing behind a
little bit. And so they had, they had moved up to the
top. And this is only counting the people who
are subscribed to Comcast for video services, not necessarily Internet
connectivity for instance. But then, you know, moving down we also
have Direct TV, Dish, Satellite Network then these files down here.
Then they've got, this is as of 2011, so obviously two years ago.
And then AT&T, U-Verse over here down with 4 million, 3.8 million respectively.
Some of these are growing very rapidly too and but at this time at least they
were at the height and they were the highest.
And really cool is that if you took at that time in March 2011, whenever this
was done. If you took the number of packets that
were on the Internet and you basically counted up the number of them that were
going for different services, okay. Netflix had 1 4th of the bits on the
Internet which is really, really interesting.
So really, what we mean by that is right here we're dividing things in terms of
upstream bandwidth, okay. And upstream means going from the
customer to wherever it was in the Internet.
Then we have downstream which is going from the Internet to the customer, right.
So if this is customer and this is the Internet, or we're never in the internet
really. the application we could call it.
Basically, upstream is from the customer to wherever.
And downstream is from wherever it's coming from back to the customer.
And if we took all across the Internet and and looked it over to see the
estimate was that Netflix in downstream which again is coming from Netflix to the
customer, had almost 30% of total downstream bandwidth.
So that means that 30% of the bits on the Internet were actually coming to Netflix
or from Netflix to customers. Which is really, really insane.
And again, large part of the reason for that is because as we say video data is
huge. And especially HD movies they require a
lot of bandwidth to serve, so it does take up a lot of room on the Internet.
And at the same time aggregate is a combination of upstream and downstream.
Just looking at all of everything that is being sent over the Internet.
And they had at that time 24.7 or about 1 4th or 25% that's where this 1 4th comes
from. So what it's saying is that one in every
four bits on the Internet in the month of March 2011 was actually coming from
Netflix. And so this is to show you how large
Netflix was in terms of the demand that they were taking from the Internet.
Christopher BrintonLecturer
Mung ChiangProfessor
