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Comment by GauntletWizard | Hacker News Reader

Netflix was a tech company. Their web-based logistics was every bit as much tech as Amazon. Their streaming platform was groundbreaking - Video-On-Demand services had existed before, but they brought new scale and techniques to it, at a time when that was still very hard.

But no, Netflix is no longer special there - Their tech is tried and true, the problems are still interesting but well solved. They ceased being a tech player... five years ago?

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Netflix is responsible for more than 10% of downstream internet traffic. Dealing with that is definitely not "off the shelf". (E.g. caching servers set up at ISPs).

That being said, only a small percentage of their market cap is related to their technology. They could outsource the whole thing to BAMTech and it probably wouldn't affect them much.

I think you and the person above you are underselling Netflix's innovation. Yes it's true, they mostly solved the problem of streaming video over the internet, and most changes there are incremental.

But they are currently innovating massively in machine learning and other data analytics. They are also innovating in "Hollywood tech".

Hollywood still uses old tech to move from capturing the actors performance to putting it in front of viewers. They mostly still track their assets with Excel (or on paper!).

Netflix can get a show from filming to viewers a lot faster than most of Hollywood can.

> But they are currently innovating massively in machine learning and other data analytics.

I bet I could find that exact sentence used somewhere to justify wework as a "tech company".

You probably could, but I would say their machine learning isn't a core part of their product that drives profits. The machine learning at Netflix has a huge impact to the product. Streaming drops 20%+ when the recommendations are offline.

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