I assume that not all encodings of every movie are stored in perpetuity, to save space. Thus, sometimes they need to be regenerated on-demand, which is why efficiency is important.
Hell, compared to the cost to license the movie storage is pennies.
> Hell, compared to the cost to license the movie storage is pennies.
Yup. I’d be very curious to see the breakdown in how much Netflix spends on compute versus content production/licensing. I’d be willing to bet compute is an order or two of magnitude cheaper than content. I guess all these little optimizations add up? Or maybe their engineering management can’t see the forest from the trees.