I think this is a crucial distinction. Netflix has a relatively unique architecture for their content delivery system compared to other online video providers, which is worth considering in context of this article.

With Netflix's Open Connect (https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/) system, most residential Internet Service Providers have appliances at the regional point of interconnection. These appliances are inside of or directly connected to the ISP's network in the region. Back in 2016 they had appliances deployed to over 1,000 locations. Content is pre-positioned during off-peak hours to the appliances.

Previously Netflix has been open about how they use AWS for "generic, scalable computing" including "all of the logic of the application interface, the content discovery and selection experience, recommendation algorithms, transcoding, etc."

At the time, they claimed that one of the advantages of doing this was the ease of use and growing commoditization of the “cloud” market, so it makes sense that they are evaluating alternative cloud providers for these commodity services.