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Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

Doesnt change the required infrasctructure. On Stranger Things premiere day you still have to have the download infrastructure to handle hundreds of millions of downloads simultanesouly.

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Not necessarily, you need one download then theoretically torrents will do the rest. People don’t download directly from Netflix.

Just to add to it, torrent isn't piracy technology, it is just a sharing protocol. Netflix could very well leverage that to lighten distribution load. Didn't think of that, nice catch.

Im pretty sure that would be illegal, but even if not there would be such pushback at using customers own bandwidth to distribute their own content.

Netflix for instance running their own tracker, then clearly advertising an advanced tier with lower pricing, with good documentation on how to set up, is just enough

World of Warcraft was distributing updates as torrents 20 years ago. It was fine.

It's actually pretty wasteful that it doesn't work that way.

You cant simply start using your customers bandwidth to distribute your own content.

just throw it in the TOS >:^)

Who said Netflix was offering the torrent?

It shifts the transcoding load to the user and it loads the movie async so you don't need the full bandwidth, so of course it changes the required infrastructure needs.

If I understand correctly streaming seervices dont transcode. They hold different versions of the same media to directly play the sppuroted version to the client

> They hold different versions of the same media to directly play the sppuroted version to the client

those different versions are transcoded from a mezzanine source, by a massive system, which is the subject of the OP. you can't just write off the main task from the discussion

The 4K mezzanine source will typically be very high bitrate, perhaps 1 TB or more. So big that it cannot be repeatedly “distributed to clients for transcoding”.

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