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Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

How do they make money?? I mean - seriously? And how will they stand up now that NN is gone and any company/website using much more traffic will be force to pay more?

Please help me with the math -- at any given day, me, my wife and 2 kids are streaming netflix on multiple devices in HD; most likely pulling tens of gigabytes of data per day. How is that all covered under $10.99 per month?? and on the top - they make solid profit?? HOW??

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They used to spend $0.05 per GB more or less per movie. I'm sure it's lower now. You may be a power streamer, but some people don't use it as much. The major cost used to be content licensing, but they are content creators now. Their top shows are becoming classics, drive tons of subscribers, and help with retention. The most important part is that they are still growing.

The problem is that if you're big enough business-wise you don't care that much about NN. It's like in Germany when Google has to pay for content in Google News and they just tell the publishers they will not include them if they don't give it to them for free despite these new rules (which are stupid). But if you're a small startup or company and you want to do this you have no chance doing this. Same goes for NN. If someone wants to block Google or Netflix now they can't really get that much from them because they need them to sell their own product or otherwise people will leave. If you're small no-one cares and your can't do anything about it. So it hurts innovation from new companies but doesn't hurt any big established players.

Besides that they also have enough revenue to invest in their own fiber infrastructure like Google does and really everyone wants to get good access to their content so they connect to them.

That might change when you are in competition with the ISP, as Comcast does with a ~30% stake of Hulu. Then you might start to care about net neutrality a lot.

Yes. That could be a problem. But in for most areas customers will be annoyed with Comcast and blame them for poor performance and switch. Still there are lots of areas in the US where you don't have a choice. But they would also loose a lot of customers in denser areas with more choice.

They stage their content directly with ISPs which it makes it cheaper and faster for everyone.

https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...

CDNs will reduce bandwidth costs per user to essentially nothing. Content creation is the lion's share of their costs.

Biggest CDN charge $9 per 1TB of transfer... how is watching 20TB per month worth less than netflix fee so that they actually make some profit?

at the scale netflix transfers data they pay much much less than this. They also do direct peering and will put boxes in your ISP datacenter - https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

Im sorry it still doesnt make sense to me. "buy 1 tone of fish pay $10 per kg", "buy 10,000 tone of fish, pay 1 cent". Doesnt make sense!! At some point more is not that much cheaper. I doubt coming back to my CDN asking for price on 1,000 TB would bring price to 1 cent per TB.

Would it help to say OpenConnect is the CDN?

If they have a box in your ISP with a cache of the content, those Gigabits are coming from a a LAN and are basically free, only limited by the infrastructure.

I see. So how can I bypass my CDN and put box with my own content inside ISP ?

have something on that box that lots of the ISPs customers use so that it lets the ISP serve the content easily and for free to their clients

Netflix is the single largest bandwidth user in the world, they don't pay list prices.

I really doubt people are watching 30+ hours of video per day per user (ca. 1TB/month).

Perhaps like gyms there are a good bunch of people who don't use it nearly as much.

Delivery of video bits costs next to nothing compared to the content. Netflix will spend 8 billion on content next year. They won't come within even an order of magnitude of that on infrastructure.

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