Netflix, Hulu, Tubi, amazon prime, etc are uploading tens of millions of videos simultaneously. Where do they get the upload speed?
To my knowledge, the fastest upload speed is google fiber at 1Gbps, but even that is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of data streaming services need to upload.
So how do streaming services upload so much data? Do they have 100,000 different servers with Google fiber levels of upload speeds of 1Gbps?
Or are there corporate options where a single building can upload at 1Tbps or higher?
Netflix has a direct connection to your ISP called the Netflix Open Connect service. When you want to stream a movie, they send it to your ISP at high-speed. Your ISP will then Stream it to you. If it’s really popular, your ISP already has the movie on their server. If it’s a new release, expected to be popular, it will be pre-distributed to ISPs all over the world for them to stream it. Your ISP cooperates with Netflix because it costs them nothing and saves them a lot of money since it significantly reduces the potential demand on their infrastructure. The other streaming services all likely have a similar Content Delivery Network (CDN).
I don’t know a lot about the technology, but doesn’t Netflix still need to upload the movie to the ISP to do that? Also wouldn’t that require ISPs to have many terabytes of storage to hold all the in demand movies?
The short answers is that yes, some ISPs can provide connection bandwidths in the terabit per second range.
You may also be wondering whether the 1 Gbps offered by Google fiber represents some kind of physical limitation. The answer is no - even a single optic fiber can carry many times that. Also, a single server should be able to provide streaming video at 10s to 100s of Gbps.
However, Hulu, Disney Plus, Netflix and the like do not put some computers in their headquarters and then call Verizon to upgrade their plan.
These videos and their servers exist in dedicated data centers, which can be located literally anywhere. It is these data centers which have the ISP connection, with a total bandwidth in the range of many terabits per second. How do they get that bandwidth? Physically, you just need enough fiberoptic cables. From a company perspective, when you build a datacenter, you arrange for the necessary connection with at least one ISP, which will involve the ISP installing the necessary hardware on their side and installing as many miles of cable as needed and the datacenter paying a lot of money for this. I assume long term contracts are also involved.
As a video streaming service, you then rent either servers in the datacenter, or the space to install your own servers. In either case, the rent will include the usage of a certain amount of the datacenters bandwidth.
Once you go up in size to the likes of Amazon or Google, you no longer rent datacenters and instead build your own. If you need a lot of bandwidth, you may decide to locate it close to an Internet exchange point. Maybe you also decide to just lay your own optic fibers to connect with the IXP. Maybe you go one step further, and decide that you are just going to buy part of an undersea cable to link up your data centers. In all of these cases congratulations, you no longer need an ISP! You simply own a part of the internet now.
The open connect system by Netflix basically comes down to distributing your servers to datacenters all over the country.
I hadn’t heard of the Open Connect appliances. I know that at one point, Netflix relied on Amazon Web Services to deliver its content to its subscribers, and that amused me, because Amazon Prime is of course a competitor.
When you get on the scale of something like Netflix, it’s not really anything like a residential user or small business renting an internet connection. At that point, you’re much closer to the internet backbone and you sort of exist in a cooperative relationship with a bunch of high level internet networks. Content delivery networks give a basic explanation.
The sort of data centers that google/amazon/microsoft/netflix use would have connections many thousands of times faster than even the fastest home connections, and they use a sophisticated method to distribute the bandwidth and data all across the internet so that it’s relatively less taxing on the network to deliver it to any end user.
It’s going to be tricky to even compute Netflix’s total bandwidth due to the issues mentioned above.
But even aside from that, there’s the question of how fast any one server box can be. And that is, most likely, around 100 Gbit/s. Ethernet comes in a bunch of standards, but modern datacenters are likely to be around 100 Gb/s. 200 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s standards exist, but they aren’t very widespread yet. And at the lower end, 10 Gb/s is basically obsolete and 40 Gb/s is being replaced. 100 Gb/s seems to be roughly the sweet spot at the moment.