For the past two years, I had been working at Netflix Streaming Infrastructure Engineering Team building two back-end servers, Watch Now Middle-tier Server (WNS) and Bravia TV Streaming Server, to support streaming Netflix Movies to PCs, XBox, PS3, STBs and TVs, such as Sony BRAVIA TV.
One key functionality of WNS is to generate dynamic Movie Stream URL pointing to CDN (Content Delivery Network), at the scale of Netflix Movie Streaming Service, Movie Content has to be distributed to CDN for devices to download and play; and since the failure of CDN, even a short period of time, would cause the problem even outage of Netflix Movie Streaming Service, Netflix has to distribute its Movie Content to multiple CDNs, and this is the key to archive reliable movie streaming:
1. This allow Netflix to shift movie streaming traffic among different CDNs for a device category if it has problem to download the movie from a CDN as mentioned in Netflix Blogs Streaming Performance and Netflix Trying for Consistent Excellence on Streaming
2. And, since the Movie Contents are available on multiple CDNs, practically you don't have to keep an in-house backup copy of all the Movie Content, cutting the cost of in-house storage system.
In general, utilizing multiple CDNs would allow people to create Content Vault Service for small internet content providers to save, distribute and deliver content reliably and it is great to know some companies have already been working on this as mentioned in Former CDN Founder Launches Plan to Disrupt the CDN Market at NewTeeVee.com
Saturday, July 03, 2010
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