I’m sure someone at Netflix did the cost/benefit analysis and found that for extremely infrequently accessed encodings of certain movies (weird bitrate/resolution combinations), it’s actually cheaper to generate them dynamically once in a blue moon than to store them in perpetuity.

> 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.